The Twelve Secrets of Social Media Success

By Hector Cisneros

Courtesy of Flickr

Several years ago, a friend told me about this great new network that was going to eliminate my need for going to network meetings. He said he could go online and connect with people. I decided to join that network to see what all the hoopla was all about. At the time my friend was talking about LinkedIn. A year later I also joined Facebook and then followed that up by joining Twitter. Later, I also joined FourSquare, Stumbleupon, YouTube, Ecademy, MerchantCircle and Google+ (just to name a few). I soon learned that using social networks was very different than most forms of online marketing. I quickly realized that social networking was very much like face to face networking. Both were a form of word of mouth marketing. Both had fairly ridged rules of how you could build credibility, specific rules that would endear you to followers and rules that would get you un-followed or un-friended very quickly.