Tips, How-Tos, Dos and Donts

This is what you look like when you use internet speak in a serious context

I am by no means what some people call a social media ‘expert.’ The entire notion of labelling someone as a digital guru or transmedia wizard is cringe-worthy. Being a part of an environment that evolves, adapts and transforms as fast as the digital industry means the vital and constant need to listen, study and learn from experiences and trends. It’s what makes my job exciting.

However, I thought it might be nice to share some basic tips (mostly Twitter-based) that can make your social media lives a lot more interactively savvy, and a lot less face-palm inducing for me. If you disagree on any of the below, I would love to hear why:

•  Live event tweeting. Not everyone will care about the launch of the new cheese grater cum headphones from Apple. If you absolutely need to do this, then warn your followers. However, unless you’re covering an event from a brand account for professional purposes, I suggest you avoid this entirely. Selectively tweeting the cream of the event crop is best - and it stops you from spamming your followers and potentially being unfollowed.

•  Overt self-promotion. Listen, we all want to be recognised for the awesome things we’ve accomplished, and it’s always especially nice to be recognised publicly. However, if fifty magazines have tweeted about how exciting your new film is, you absolutely need NOT re-tweet fifty messages within a ten minute time frame. Be selective, pick the best and then let the tweeters do the promoting for you. Don’t give your followers the chance to label you as gloat-y or self-obsessed. Also, use the ‘Favourite’ tool – highly underrated, and allows you to archive tweets for later use.

•  This isn’t Mean Girls. You don’t need to unfollow me if I’ve decided to unfollow you. Twitter (unless it’s reality television based) is not a popularity contest. You should be following people you find interesting, have similar interests with, educational even. In effect, someone’s decision to unfollow you should really have no impact on your ‘following’ list. Get over it and engage to grow your followers list.

•  Remember the lol cats? They were cute. But its over now and ToO much of these LULZ internets sp3aks cud make me confooz yew with A prepubezcent tEEn. It’s annoying. Grammar rules still apply on social media, so use your internet lingo in sarcasm and/or only in absolutely LULZ circumstances. 

•  Deleting people’s comments/your previous tweets. Pet social media hate. If you’re posting something online, expect savagery in return. Okay, it’s not always that bad, but the internet creates a safe zone for discussion (sometimes incredibly heated) and if you’re a ‘dish it out’ social media peep, then you need to be ready to take it. Think things through before you post them, “Will this get me in trouble?” “Who’s going to see this post?” “Am I being overtly controversial?” etc. Remember, the internet is like a big log book for everything you’ve ever done.