The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

This summer I had the pleasure of reading many books that taught me about the professional aspects of using social media. The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users is by authored by Guy Kawasaki, best-selling author and chief evangelist at Canva and Peg Fitzpatrick, social-media strategist and director of digital media for Kreussler Inc.

The two chapters I wanted to highlight from this are Chapter 1 and 2. They dive in to most foundational parts of social media, profiles and posting.

Chapter 1: How to Optimize Your Profile

Covering all the basics (profile photos, cover images, bio paragraphs), Kawasaki narrates how to maximize our online presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Twitter. Profile optimization is important because of how people use it and if you do it right it can be serve as a resume to convey how you want people to see you. Your profile should make you are likable and trustworthy by having a screen name you can use as progress through your career, a profile avatar (or picture) that is just you and recognizable, and cover photo that is changed often as you tell your story.

You shouldn’t spend long optimizing your profile, but it should be complete and consistent on every platform.

Businesses should follow the same guidelines however should opt for the business account/page platforms offer to avoid closure of the pages & take advantage of added capabilities such as analytics.

The most interesting concept from Chapter 1 was the idea of crafting a mantra. A mantra is two to four words that explain why you or your organization exists. Kawasaki mantra is “I empower people”, while Canva uses “democratizing design” as its mantra. I couldn't stop thinking about what mine would be, "maybe to impact the world by impacting one person".

Chapter 2: How to Feed The Content Monster

It’s hard to create new content every day so an important resource is curated content. Content curation involves finding other people’s good stuff, summarizing it, and sharing it. It’s helpful because you benefit by getting more content to share and the source benefits from increased traffic to them.

Tips to doing this successfully include resharing the posts of people you already follow, using curation and aggregation services, using lists/groups or using user-generated content of your products and services. It's always good to make use of evergreen content - topics that almost always popular - if you hit a brick wall looking for curated content. (Check out this blog post to learn most about evergreen content and what makes it useful) A useful rule in feeding the “content monster” is passing the Reshare Test, be sure to ask yourself the following question: “Will people reshare my post?”

The biggest takeaway I think you can have from this chapter and is that no matter where you get the content from always be sure to ask for permission before using it and give proper attributions.

While the book is pretty outdated with so many Google+ tips and references to studies conducted in 2012 or later, the information is so useful. I enjoyed reading this book, I think anyone wanting to learn more can really make use of the tips in this book.

You can purchase the book at any of the links below:
Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Barnes & Noble