A decade ago,²⁹ I used to manage bands in Toronto and it was always said, “Before you can fill a stadium, you have to fill a club.” So even though your dream is to play in front of thousands, try filling a club with a hundred first. Same goes for social media. Most people want the million views on YouTube, 100,000 followers on Twitter, and to be hitting the front page of Digg every week, but that’s not going to happen right away and it will never happen if you try to do it all at once.

Build a small stage—your platform—that you’re going to stand on and get people to come to. Pick one place where you want people to find you and play your best “show” there for as long as it takes to build a solid following. If you tell people to come find you on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, read your blog, and watch your videos on YouTube when you first encounter them, they’re going to run the other way.

There are three steps to successfully building your platform: Traction, momentum, and expansion. You have to start by building traction. Social media can be a very challenging tool to use when you are just starting out. You post a few comments, send out a tweet or two, post your blog, and no one answers. It is easy to write it off as not working. Even if you have followers, only a small percentage of your followers are online; or will see any given tweet or post, and a fraction of those will reply to you. The best advice I have is to jump in. On Twitter especially, there is no such thing as interruption. The biggest regret of people who have gained traction is that they wish they had jumped in sooner.

When you are building traction, consistency is very important. If you have a few hours per week to commit to social media, that time is more effective if you spread it out rather than spending it all in one big chunk a week. Find people you want to follow; learn from and get to know and then start replying to them, or sharing things they have said. Think of things that you can tweet or post that are helpful to others and engaging. Ask questions and be there to discuss the answers.

Once you have gained traction, you are now in the second phase of platforming—momentum. Now remember that this can happen at different points for different people and businesses. How you define your goals for social media is up to you. If you have reached a point where you are getting something out of the network, then you are here. This is not about a number of followers or fans, it is about engagement. This is not the time for you to get lazy. Momentum is the time when you switch from looking for new relationships toward enhancing current ones. Sites like Twitter are great for initially getting to know someone, but if you really want to enhance relationships, it’s time to take them to the next level. This is where social media and the real world start to mix. Going anywhere from a local tweetup ³⁰ to a major conference in your industry, social media can be an incredible tool for before, during and after the event.

Momentum is also the stage where you are going to want to manage your social media use more efficiency. Using a desktop application such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite sorts your activity in columns and allows you to manage your activity on multiple sites, and applications like UberTwitter for your smart phone to keep up on the go. The last thing you want to do is to start getting momentum somewhere and become overwhelmed and end up leaving. Don’t be fooled by social media gurus that tell you that social media is a great way to build relationships without effort. Nothing out there will ever change the fact that relationships take time.

You have to be wary of expectations. Servicing requests/ concerns of your market when you only have a few talking to you is easy, but it can quickly get out of hand if you do not manage expectations. Answering a tweet about your product at 2 AM makes you look like you are dedicated but soon turns into expectation. One company doing a great job of this across all platforms is VistaPrint. I was especially impressed with how they manage expectations on their Twitter account.³¹ On their main page, within their bio they mention the hours that they are available to answer tweets. They start the day with a good morning sign in and end with an end of day goodbye, including the customer service toll free number in case an important issue comes up outside these hours. When I asked Jeff Esposito, the PR Manager for VistaPrint about the way they manage follower expectations he said, “The last thing we wanted to do was to make it look like we weren’t listening. Since we have customers around the world, we wanted to make sure they knew they mattered. The worst thing you can do is to show people you are listening to some and not others.”

The third stage of platforming is expansion. For me, launching my blog marked this point. I purposefully grew my platform on Twitter first and waited until I knew I could drive readers and commenters to the site. It is one thing to send a tweet or even a post on Facebook and have no replies, but to write a 500 to 800-word blog post and have no one come and read it is really hard. It is also important to expand your platform to take your dialogue with followers to the next level and grow the relationship. I started mine after someone asked me what I would do if Twitter went down unexpectedly one day.³²

Now just because you have written “a post” and uploaded it, you can’t just starting wearing your “I’m web 2.0” t-shirt. A blog without the ability to engage is just called an article. It is the ability to interact within the comment system that changes a post from being static to ecstatic. There are a variety of free tools to allow threaded comments.³³ The one I am currently using, Disqus,³⁴ not only allows threaded comments, but also sends me a notification and reply to a comment directly through e-mail. This way I can keep up on comments and reply to relevant ones that turn into conversations that enhance the quality of the post. I can also reply with the word delete and it will instantly remove the comment from the blog if it is spam or hateful in any way. It’s crucial that commentators are notified of a reply via e-mail (if they choose), otherwise they won’t know you have replied to them and the conversation stops.

I choose not to moderate comments, meaning that I do not approve before they are posted. I find moderation of this kind stifles momentum and conversation because of the delay. You lose the initial emotion moment that led to the comment in the first place, making it less likely for people to pass around the blog on which they have commented.

You need to be wary about building your entire “empire” on somebody else’s site. I love it when people on Facebook form protest groups about a new change on the site, when it is neither their site nor do they pay anything to use it.³⁵ You are also fighting through a million other voices on those sites. For example, when I started my big push on Twitter, it hadn’t yet hit the mainstream.³⁶ It was much easier for any single tweet of mine to get noticed because I wasn’t competing with a million other marketers, Ashton Kutcher, or somebody’s cat.

One of the dangers of trying to expand too early to multiple platforms is you are tempted to promote them all to everyone at once. I get direct messages from people on Twitter constantly, before I know much about them, telling me to come add them on Facebook or LinkedIn. No no, let’s get to know each other within the platform we met on first.³⁷

It also makes sense to match your platform with your market. Playing heavy metal in a jazz club isn’t going to work so well. So whatever your platform location is, make sure your audience is ready for it. If you want them to subscribe to your blog, and the audience isn’t tech geeks, you better make sure you offer more than an RSS feed to subscribe. Years ago I had a conversation with an online video producer, before the days when high-speed connections were the norm. He ranted about how online video was grainy and he wouldn’t reduce the quality of videos just to save bandwidth. I wished him well and told him to enjoy his videos since he’d be the only one watching them. Today it’s a different story, his market has adopted it, and high-quality streaming video is the norm. He was just a few years early for his show to start. ☺