Debbie Mayo-Smith: Guy Kawasaki on gaining followers

Guy Kawasaki. Photo / Supplied

Last week I wrote about attending the Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast to listen to Silicon Valley author, speaker, and advisor to Motorola, Guy Kawasaki.

He started with ten points of Enchantment. The things a business must do, how staff must be an influencer and how to be successful in today's market.

Please excuse the outline basis of today's column, I'm trying to condense his second hour into this brief column. Some of the points for many of you will be common sense, but there are a few pearl surprises here:

Guy's Ten Keys to Gaining Followers

1. Start yesterday

It takes at least six to nine months to get a good group of followers. If you wait until your product/service is ready for market, it has to wait this time for word of mouth. Start social media in parallel, concurrently.

2. Segment the services

Guy's Five P's of Social Media and what they're good for:

a. Facebook - people

b. Twitter - perceptions

c. Google + - passionate (your interests)

d. Pinterest - Pictures. Mostly populated by women

e. LinkedIn - pimping - when you need to sell yourself or your product

3. Make a great profile

a. Your big picture - the cover photo should reflect your interests, what you're about.

b. Avatar should be a head shot, it should show you as a likable, enchanting competition person.

c. The text should be written like your elevator pitch.

4. Curate and Link

It's impossible to write all the time, it's okay to link to other content that will be interesting and relevant to your audience. He runs a content aggregation site called www.alltop.com. It's broken into content groups so you can grab areas of interest. Curating is finding and linking to content written by others.

5. Cheat

Find out what is going to be the next big thing, the next hot thing and start talking about it. There's a section on Google+ called What's hot. There is also mostpopular.alltop.com

6. Restrain yourself

Add value, don't just self-promote. Guy's rule of thumb is 1:19. For every time you try to promote yourself, have 19 other posts of interest

7. Add bling

Pictures, pictures, pictures. Larger the better. When you are linking to news items, don't let their little thumbnail tell the story, it's too little. Instead take a screen shot and use that with the link. Give credit to the photo's author of course.

8. Respond

You must respond to people who take the time to post

9. Stay positive or shut up

There will always be negative comments, but don't buy into the repartee'. Instead have a rule of three. You post and respond only once to a negative comment. After that - let it go.

10. Repeat

Social media has an eight hour life span. He repeats every post four times. The online scheduler he uses is bufferapp.com for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Google+ has a share app but it isn't run remotely, your computer and Chrome has to be on.

Do you agree? What are your thoughts?

Written by international speaker and bestselling author Debbie Mayo-Smith. For more tips, over 500 how-to articles visit Debbie's article webpage.