If you’re a new or not yet established brand, how should you use social media to build a reputation for yourself?

Apart from making sure your product/website is relevant to the social media channel, it is also useful to participate in social media communities as an end-user or brand representative.

My previous post on social networking ROI already talked about the benefits for building a strong social media presence so let’s move on to examine the characteristics which constitute successful social media profiles.

What are some qualities which contribute to the growth and eventual popularity of a social media profile? Assuming that you aren’t a niche celebrity and don’t have a well-established brand name, what characteristics of your profile should you develop for maximum social media presence?

To uncover these factors, let’s take a look at social news communities, sites which allow their users to have editorial control over the popularity/visibility of content. Although I’m using social news as an example, note that the points I make apply to other social media channels such as networks, forums, blogs as well.

This article is not just for end-users/webmasters but businesses who want to learn how to start using social media to develop a stronger online reputation.

When I started using social news sites like Sphinn and Digg, I was a nobody. My early story submissions to both sites received only a handful of votes and very few people knew who I was, let alone added me as a friend or actively followed the stories I submitted.

A few months later, I’ve submitted over 300 digg frontpage stories and became the No.1 user on Sphinn in terms of Sphinn stories gone hot. I’ve made new friends and other users are more likely to pay attention to what I contribute now.

The point here is not about me transforming from nobody into someone of social media importance. Anyone can do that with some concerted effort. The lesson I want to impart here is that there are some general characteristics which underlie a popular social media profile. I’m going to tell you what they are.

How to Build a Popular Social Media Profile: 7 Helpful Characteristics

These characteristics are no secret and they apply to both new social media users as well as already popular brands seeking to leverage the exposure that social media gives. Instead of explaining in an abstract manner, I’ll try to link these points with what I’ve done with existing social media profiles.

In my opinion, here are the 7 characteristics of a successful social media profile:

1. Strong Profile Visibility: Developing Brand Recognition

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A good social media profile is highly visible in multiple channels. The more people connect your social media profile to your existing brand or website the better. Start to increase your visibility by inter-connecting all your social media profiles and web properties (blog/podcast/forum etc.).

After which, take this one step further by evangelizing the social media service. When I first using StumbleUpon, I published detailed guides on dosh dosh and drove traffic to my profile. This increased the number of people who befriended me on SU.

Don’t rely on cheesy incentive-based contests to build an audience, just become a gateway for others into the social media channel and you’ll develop followers. Teach, guide and help others adopt and use the social media service. It’s not difficult to do and everyone benefits in the end.

Visibility is also reliant on your participation levels. When I first started using Sphinn, I submitted a good deal of stories everyday and always voted new stories religiously. I deliberated maintained the high submission volume because I wanted my avatar to become more familiar to the other Sphinn users.

When you think about visibility, think about it in terms of familiarity or brand recognition as well. You not only want people to see your profile, you want them to know and recognize it instantly. Broad visibility will give you a lot of opportunities for networking, which helps you along the way.

2. Active Participation: Maintaining a Continuous Presence

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The more active you are on a social media channel, the more likely you are to build a strong reputation. The amount of time you spend on the site is directly proportionate to the growth of your brand presence. To be highly active via a social media website, you need to strategically set aside time to use it everyday.

You must not only be active but regular. Don’t use the website for 2 weeks and then disappear for a month. I’ve seen this happen for Digg users and when they come back after a while, they’ll find that other users have un-friended them and may find it difficult to get people to notice their submissions.

This applies to all social media profiles. Attention or influence accumulates. Strive to build on what you’ve gained. Just sitting back and slacking off limits your potential for maximum visibility. When you are entering into social media, the best thing to do is to maintain a continous presence from the start.

I treat social websites like I treat email. I am most active two times a day, morning and night. In between, I use social media sporadically: only when I comes across interesting content to share with other users. I’ve done the same for many months and it has become a habit of some sort.

The initial stage of building a profile will always require an investment of your time. Take it from me: it gets easier over time. At the moment, I spend considerably less energy and time on all my social media profiles than when I first started. Why? Because established brands tend to spread themselves.

3. Practice Reciprocity: Seek Win-Win Outcomes

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In social news websites, users often vote because of the submitter and not the story. This is because they are reciprocating votes given to their own stories or sites. Psychologists likeRobert Cialdini have mentioned that reciprocation is a natural component of human relationships. It’s not strange to find it in social media.

But instead of merely trading votes, trade attention and other assets. When someone shows interest in your social profile by linking to or promoting it, keep an eye out for the his/her profile or interests as well. Go beyond mere site-specific functions and think about how you and the other user can collaborate in mutually-beneficial ventures.

Reciprocation is not just a mechanical game of blind, circular suppport but a pro-active tactic. Instead of reacting, take the initiative doing someone a favor, and ask nothing in return. The unspoken rule of reciprocation will ensure that it’ll come back to you. Even if you don’t get anything in return, at least you’ve made a friend.

And friends matter a great deal in social media.

4. Effective Communication: Conversations are Important

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A good social media profile is always open to communication. Request and listen to feedback. Learn from the people around you. Make it easy for others to contact you away from the social media channels by providing your contact information.

Communication also involves some power networking: try to interact with other fellow social media users by talking about the community or other common interests.

When you’re communicating, you’re learning. When I talk to other social media users, I almost always learn something new. Even experts need the grapevine.

It’s impossible for anyone to know everything and anything to do with social media, let alone be perpetually updated with the latest happenings with each website. Let other social media users be your informants, let them be your teachers.

Communication is an integral part of building relationships and its a good way to make new friends or acquaintances that may benefit you in the future. Talking to other people is also fun and it enriches the social media experience. Conversations are a big part of social media: Keep this in mind.

Although I might not be available on IM every day, I do try to reach out to the people who are most active on the same social media channels. These are the people I like to talk to the most because they are actively engaged as I am. Make a point to connect whenever you have issues to discuss and not only when you need a favor.

5. Support the Community: Putting the Collective Before Oneself

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A good social media user supports the community in many ways. She reports bugs, shares feedback about the site and highlights issues concerning other users. When you see other social media users struggling to broadcast news about the community, help them to spread the word.

A successful social media profile is one that is well integrated with the collective. And that integration is naturally developed when one is passionate or supportive of other users in the community and the site itself. Offer constructive criticisms of these websites and help other users to get heard.

While using Digg, I’ve noticed a few users who consistently shout or promote the stories of other users. They have nothing to gain except that they believe the story deserves to be on the frontpage. These users are selfless and they care more about the community than their own digg submission/frontpage record.

While there aren’t many of these users, they demonstrate a mentality that I think should be adopted more often in social media. When you build a profile or enter into social media, think in terms of the collective first before you focus on your self.

This not only allows you to develop credibility but naturally leads me into the next point on providing value.

6. Provide Value Above All: Gaining Trust and Attention

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There is one reason why you should provide value before expecting profit when it comes to social media: value leads to the development of trust. To build a successful brand through social media, you should first earn trust by providing value through your participation.

For instance when I started using Digg/Sphinn, I mostly submitted stories from other websites instead of mine. I deliberately minimized the benefits I could get from each channel even though both of them welcome the submissions of your own articles.

Why? Because the impression of providing excellent value is one I want to associate with my profile. I ended up submitting tons of articles from other sites and directed millions of visitors to them. I didn’t ask for anything in return.

I’m sure you’ve seen Digg users who submit nothing but their own website all the time. There’s nothing wrong with it inherently but this gives one a bad reputation among other users. If you do it aggressively enough, you’ll may even be labeled a spammer and your site might be blacklisted/penalized by other users or site admins.

What’s the problem here? Simple. You’re not contributing value to the community, you’re only trying to extract benefits. This doesn’t work. If you look like you’re constantly trying to pitch your affiliate link or drive traffic to your site, you’re never going to build a popular social media profile.

The sad truth is that if you focus on providing value, other users will trust and follow you or your site more closely. You gain attention and your brand grows, which often leads to greater benefits in the future in terms of traffic, reputation or connections.

This is the way I built up profiles on every social site I’ve used. Provide value above all. Don’t overfocus on extracting benefits. You can’t go wrong with this strategy.

7. Demonstrate Integrity

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You want to make sure that you’re developing a legitimate social media profile because many people are keeping their eye on you. There’s no point in creating a strong social media presence only to do something stupid to mess up your reputation.

When I talk about ethics, I’m mainly referring to personal principles, unwritten community rules and each site’s Terms of Use. Don’t do anything that violates each social media website’s rules. Even if you really want to do something against the regulations, at least make sure you don’t get caught.

You can bend the rules a little and experiment with social media but make sure that what is visible to your audience is legitimate. A large part of the social media audience will not appreciate you breaking the rules if they discover it. It only takes a few people and a few words to damage your social media profile.

Unwritten rules may vary for each website and you’ll probably get a hang of what to do or what not do after you’ve participated and talked to other social media users. These rules are not set in stone and you can act outside of established norms, although you should do it in a way which frames yourself in a positive light.

Apart from self-preservation, ethics can also improve your reputation of your brand in social media. Integrity is a much respected characteristic by all, so tailor your behavior to demonstrate that. This is especially important for new brands entering social media, since they have no previous clout to leverage.

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For example, I know what I share on Twitter will be seen by all my followers I make sure to only share non-spammy and useful/interesting websites. When I submit a digg story, it has a 44% chance of hitting the digg frontpage, so I make sure the site I’m submitting is legitimate.

Precautions like this may seem minor but people notice what you do. Once I’ve had a user message me to tell me that a story I submitted to Digg was stolen from another website. I emailed digg support and had them remove the story immediately.

I don’t want my name to be associated with plagiarism of any form. You might think it’s not a big deal but reputation is built step by step from the ground up.

Your brand is simply a summation of many situations, all compounded into a coherent whole. Every public action matters. In short, take a stand on what you believe in, demonstrate integrity and use each social media website ethically to protect your established reputation.


And that concludes the characteristics of a popular social media profile. If you’ve got questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’ll be glad to answer them.

Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing is a tutorial series which teaches you how to utilize the power of social media channels to get more exposure for your brand, website and business. The post you’ve just read is the 8th article in the series.

Social media aggregators are web sites which amass what you do on social networks or websites and centralize it all in one location.

These aggregators enable lifestreaming, which is a simply the publication and sharing of your daily activities in continuous sessions. These social lifestreams allow you to keep track of what your friends or other people are doing online.

In other words, they are tools you can use to observe the activity of others on various social sites or allow others to follow what you’re doing all around the web.

One of the most popular social aggregators is called Friendfeed and it appears to be the most widely used service amongst many other lifestreaming services.

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information.

By using an automated, crawl-based approach to finding the content you find interesting, our hope is that your FriendFeed experience will be completely “maintenance free” — you can help your friends and family discover what you’re sharing without changing the way you already use your favorite web-based products.

Friendfeed is an additional way for you to connect with other people online through their interactions on various social websites. You can check out the videos they favorited on Youtube, read the stories they submitted to Digg or learn about what they recently added to their bookmarks in del.icio.us…. all in one webpage.

I’ve been wanting to write about Friendfeed for a while but didn’t because I wanted to let it develop a little more. Right now, there’s a good mixture of applications and commentary on Friendfeed so it’s a good time to talk about it on Dosh Dosh.

What are the Benefits in Using Lifestreaming Services Like Friendfeed?

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There’s been quite a lot of people blogging about Friendfeed and other lifestreaming services but some of them only talk about features and not really benefits i.e. what you stand to gain. I’m always interested in exploring new social media tools but the first thing I think about is how they’ll help me.

Translating lifestreaming and social aggregation into benefits is something I want to do. I don’t care if the service looks terrific or ugly. It doesn’t matter if they have a million features that nobody has. All I want to know is how it’ll benefit me, how it’ll improve myself, my web properties or my relationships with others.

Having played around it for a while, here are the three main benefits I see from using Friendfeed (and other social aggregators), apart from fun/pleasure:

1. Networking With Others. Social aggregators offer many entry points for people looking to connect with another person. There’s no lack of conversation fodder. You can talk to other Friendfeed users about the items they’ve shared by commenting on the site itself or the originating social site.

   Watching what the other party does gives you a better understanding of what he or she is like and allows you to acquire better knowledge on how to interact with another person. It’s basically a communication platform, a place where you can use to comment on shared links or topics.

   Lifestreaming services are also useful for relationship maintenance. If you like to keep up with close friends or people you know, Friendfeed is a good way to make sense of what’s going on in their online lives.

2. More Information Sources. This is in my opinion, the best feature of Friendfeed. Everyone is constantly performing social actions that are aggregated into their lifestream. This can be a useful source of information or news, especially if you use site filters or follow users that are particularly active. By filtering your friend stream according to individual social media websites, you can easily get very specific recommendations.

   For instance, monitoring the LastFM or Netflix stream gives me a list of new songs/movies to check out. If a particular user is a maven or industry leader, just subscribing to his/her stream alone will give you an inside look at important news, sometimes as soon as they break.

3. Expand Your Reach. Social aggregators like Friendfeed compile all your social activities in one place. When you give someone the URL to your Friendfeed profile, you’re granting them viewer ship of what you do online. This convenience for others allows them to give you their attention, thereby increasing your social media equity.

   Someone monitoring your lifestream might share or spread what you like or discover to others as well. When actively promoted, Friendfeed can be a useful way to sustain the attention of your audience away from your main channel, which might be a blog or online business.

Can you have all these benefits independent of Friendfeed? Definitely. There are many ways to interact with others online and you can certainly acquire enough information sources to re-use or consume. So why even consider using Friendfeed? This is a hard case to make, especially if you’re already experiencing information overload when working online. Do you need this additional distraction?

The value of Friendfeed (and social lifestreaming) is that it associates information online with your friends or people you know. Instead of subscribing to a blog with a fixed niche topic, yousubscribe to an individual mind. To a person whose qualities or knowledge you trust, thereby letting that person show you around the web.

When you add someone on Friendfeed, you’re entrusting your time to a tour guide.

For example, if you trust me after reading the information here on dosh dosh and think that I’m interesting, you might want to know what I read, consume or do online. Subscribing to my friendfeed is the closest way to experience what I experience when I’m cruising the social web.

The benefits you get from social lifestreaming services like Friendfeed are mainly achieved when you subscribe to people you find genuinely interesting or people you know in order to obtain information or communicate.

Using Friendfeed: Some Recommended Applications and Tools

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I’m a big believer in actively using a social media service in order to truly ‘get’ it. After all, I didn’t understand the value of Twitter until I started using it regularly. Participation is the gateway towards value extraction.

And so, let me share some of the Friendfeed tools which I’ve found useful:

• MySocial 24 x 7: A Firefox sidebar extension which opens up Friendfeed in the sidebar so you can browse the web while keeping an eye on your friends. It allows you to comment on items that your friends post right in the sidebar and it also comes with filters to sort updates according to social media service or friend. This is pretty much my favorite Friendfeed application right now and I highly recommend using it if you run Firefox.
• Alert Thingy: A desktop application much like twhirl, a Twitter client. It automatically updates with desktop notifications and sound when new items from your friends are posted. It’s not so useful because you can’t filter your stream according to user or web service. But try it if you can: it might be just what you need.
• Greasemonkey Scripts: If you’re using Firefox/Flock, some greasemonkey scripts will really enhance your experience of the web interface. This script to filter friends by service is quite essential because Friendfeed doesn’t yet allow you to filter your friend streams according to the specific web service (for e.g. to view only Youtube activity)

So how do I use Friendfeed? Since I practically live inside my RSS feed reader, I initially subscribed to the entire stream of updates from my friends via RSS. I checked it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon for content. This is the most non-interruptive way of using Friendfeed.

The other alternative is to visit the Friendfeed website and to check on what the people I follow are doing. This second method encourages you to participate a bit more because reading the RSS feeds is a lot more passive: you might feel lazy to click over and comment.

However, I eventually moved on from that and started using the MySocial Firefox extension. Since I’m using a widescreen monitor, this was perfect for me. I get to keep up to date with what’s happening and it’s not too distracting at all. One-click sends the sidebar away and I can occasionally zero in on a few users to see what they’ve been up to for the past 24 hours.

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

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Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.