From One to Many

While this book is primarily focused on influencing one person or a small group, social media now make it possible to influence many people directly with the same message. In fact, the people who are most effective at getting their messages across in this way are called “influencers.”

Social media sites provide a way to form new influence relationships, to learn from others, and to make your voice heard within communities you belong to and care about. Many users see these sites primarily as a communication tool to stay in touch with friends and family, as a way of learning about or offering career or job opportunities, or as a way to expand their mailing lists. Others, though, see in these sites the potential for building their reputation, for providing access to people and groups that they might never otherwise meet, and for two-way influence on topics that are important to their success.

It's especially important to be clear as to why you're choosing this means to influence others. Since it's one to many and you have limited control as to who may eventually read or hear about it, make sure you've thought carefully about your influence goal, your key influence targets, and why you see social media and this site in particular as an important way to reach them.

How to Become a Social Media “Influencer”

Membership has its privileges, but in order to gain the greatest value from this new influence opportunity, it's important to take direct action. Here are a few ways you can use social media to increase your influence impact:

• Sign up for or become active on social media sites related to your personal or professional focus.
• Connect to key colleagues and follow important “influencers.”
• Join and post in groups that share your interests.
• Respond to other's posts and engage in conversations with them.
• Invite people with similar interests to connect.
• Start conversations in groups and contribute frequently to the ones you're following.
• Choose a topic that's timely and relevant and write a short, well-researched or thought-through article. Post a link to it in groups that may be interested.
• If you don't have a personal website, consider setting one up where you can post all of your articles so that when a topic arises that you've written about, you can refer people to your website.
• Share articles that others have written that interest you and might help move people in a direction you believe in.
• Engage in public conversations with people who see things differently so that you can influence people who are currently undecided toward your point of view.
• Follow the rules of the group such as not marketing or selling your books or services.
• Be clear about what your objective is in participating on social media.

Writing an Influential Post or Article

Some of the suggestions in the previous chapter on influencing through electronic means are also relevant to social media. For example, just as you should write a compelling subject line to make sure someone opens your e-mail message, choose a title for your post that will catch the attention of the people you want to influence. While you're sending a message that is potentially one to many, that only happens if people are influenced to read it!

When posting on professional sites, such as LinkedIn, you'll need to strike the right balance. You'll want to show that you are knowledgeable and have something of value to share without coming across as simply trying to drive sales of your book or visits to your website. The most well-received and influential posts seem to have two things in common: (1) a well–thought-through reply to the question posed or to an earlier response (often giving credit to the author of that post by name) and (2) a certain generosity of spirit. This is evidenced by several things—including, but not limited to

• Providing personal and specific stories of how you've dealt with the issue.
• Sharing mistakes and failures and the learning that resulted from them.
• Offering to share resources that were helpful to you either by linking to them or inviting people to contact you in order to receive them (and not following that with a constant stream of marketing messages).
• Supporting and reinforcing the thoughts of others in the stream (by name) and encouraging others to read their posts or links.
• When writing an article, your main goal is to make it interesting enough for people to want to share with their friends and colleagues, thus introducing new people to your thought leadership. Tackle this as you would any opportunity to publish your work—that means:
  • Create a succinct title that reflects the content.
  • Make sure to give proper credit to other authors or researchers whose work you refer to or quote.
  • Edit your work carefully—or ask someone else to do so—so you're sure it's free of typos, poor grammar, misplaced apostrophes, misspellings, and all the other oh-so-human errors that can cause people to devalue your work.
  • Keep it brief and use the first paragraph to give readers a sense of what they'll gain from reading the whole article.
  • When possible, use stories and examples to illustrate your points—the human brain is wired to learn from stories.
  • Point people to your article through other social media sites and ask others who like your work to do the same.

The phenomenon of social media seems as if it creates a new venue for influence. In fact, it simply provides an expanded marketplace for ideas. The best ideas, sadly, don't always have the greatest influence impact. The marketplace is crowded, and there's a lot of competition. But by focusing on communicating your best ideas in a clear, professional, and interesting way, and being thoughtful about where, when, and how you display them, you can use social media to expand your network and your social influence.