For individuals and companies, It is impossible to build a brand without using social media platforms nowadays. I recently read The art of social media power tips for power users book is written by Guy Kawasaki and Peg FitzPatrick.
The Art of social media: Power tips for power users
The first reason I choose this book is the rich experience of Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick in social media management. He is a chief evangelist at Canva designing company, and He was a chief evangelist at Apple and Motorola. Peg is a Social media strategist and director at Kruessler inc. She had successfully delivered many social media campaigns for Google, Motorola, Audi, and Canva.
This book talks about how to lay a strong social media foundation both for an individual and company. This book lists around 120 easy to read steps about social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, and Pinterest.
All these 120 steps categories into how to write a great profile, how to write a great content, How to write a great post, How to manage comments and How to integrate social media and Blogging, How to run live programs, How to run google hangouts, How to avoid overconfidence and how to optimize for individual platforms.
In the end, This book takes a practical case study (How to launch a book) and explains How to use all these tips and tricks. This Book also lists tools and websites wherever necessary. But most of the tools like Likealyzer, PostPlanner, and Klout had stopped their service as of now.
This is one of the disappointments for me regarding this book.
Some important points I learned from this book.
- Create a strong profile on every social media platform that should give a great impression for the opposite person under 5 seconds.
- Plan your content and schedule it using tools like SproutSocial, HootSuite, or Buffer.
- Content curation is important as much as a content generation.
- Make use of Facebook groups, Google+ circles/communities, and Twitter Lists to spread the content and brand on social media.
- Try to tell a visual story as much as possible.
- Write a post that gives value to the user and avoid writing if you can not add value to the user.
- Do not forget to include hashtags and increase discoverability.
- Write posts in as many languages as possible
- Be positive while replying to comments and do not take anything personally.
- If required delete a comment, block, or report a person.
- Add a share button to your blog and add social media posts to your blog.
- Create a mail list and share your blog articles with your mail list.
- Don't call yourself an expert and Don't ask your readers to share your posts.
- Use personalized connection request on the LinkedIn
- Create a Slideshare presentation and share it on Linkedin.
- Start collaborative boards on Pinterest
- Create a visual story on Twitter
- Use popular hashtags on Instagram
- Interact with other pages as much as possible.
- Integrate your Facebook page with the Instagram page.
The book contains 120 highly practical tips and tricks mentioned above.
Few missing things in this book are like below.
- Most of the time, This book talks only about a strong social media foundation but does not talk about growth activities/tips for the social media brand.
- This book does not talk about the strategy required for creating hashtags on social media platforms.
- Most of the tools like LikeAlyzer, Post planner and Klout mentioned in this book are not present as of now.
Overall This book is highly recommended for building great social media brands.