When I consult with people and businesses about social media, one of the topics that always seems to come up is that of follower count. They look at my follower count and I get questions like how did you get so many followers or why would 38,000 people follow you.

The first and more important thing to understand is that unless you are a celebrity of sorts, building followers takes effort. Even many celebrities have to actually put work into it. The second thing to understand is that only a certain percentage of the people that follow you will ever take action on what you say.

When we think about second reason, we also should understand that the percentage of people that will take action on what you say relates directly to the quality of your followers. The higher the quality of followers, the more action they will take. The more people who are your fans, the more they will do something with the information you put out.

With any event, online or offline, there is a certain point where you have enough attendees to make the event take fire and become a great event. Sometimes, getting that critical mass is easy and sometimes it's a little more difficult.

Think about a concert you might go to. If the venue seats 10,000 people but only 2,000 show up, the concert will lack a certain amount of energy. It will lack that energy simply because of the lack of people. You put those same people in a venue that will hold only 2,000 people and the energy level changes.

Social media is no different. When you have 100 people that follow you on twitter or 25 friends on Facebook, there is at least a psychological barrier for people to want to follow because they don't know if you are worth it until other people think it.

When you work on follower building activities for any of your social media channels, you need both quantity and quality. You start with the quantity. You start by getting shear numbers. At some point, you'll hit a critical mass of followers, among them will be some quality. But, as you look for people that are the quality followers, those that are more likely to action on what you have to say, it will be easier because you'll have a bit of credibility.

Now, there is a risk when building your follower count. That risk is fake followers. You'll never want to employ the tactic of getting fake followers. A fake follower is generally an account that is built for the sole purpose of ginning up your numbers. Getting a fake follower is not an accident. Someone actually has to set up a process to generate the fake accounts.

A high fake follower count greatly reduces your credibility and can undermine your goals if you are not careful.

I recently found a site that identifies how many fake followers your Twitter account has. You might consider checking it out here. When you find a fake follower, you should really work to trim those accounts out by blocking them. That forces them to unfollow you.

The problem is that most people or businesses don't want to block them because they think it sends a bad message to force their follower counts lower and blocking users. Personally, I think it sends a worse message to have accounts following you that are fake.

When considering how you build your audience, remember that quantity is important to build some perceptive credibility but the real goal is to build quality. Quantity is simply a tool to make that a reality.

In 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) was founded and coined the term social bookmarking. Even though the concept had been around for some time, Delicious pioneered the concept of tagging the links allowing for easy categorization of your bookmarks.

If you aren't familiar with the idea of social bookmarking you might be familiar with some of the websites that provide this service.

Today, arguably the most popular social bookmarking site is Pinterest. But, historically, depending on the audience, others that have been (and continue to be) popular include StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit.

A social bookmarking site is a website that doesn't contain it's own content. Instead, it contains links to other content on the internet. Consider that the most common use for Pinterest is to pin a picture (link) from another website and then your followers will be able to click through to see that link.

Social bookmarking allows you to get your content out to multiple audiences in multiple ways. Depending on the type of post and the audience your bookmark is submitted to, you will find that different social media platforms (including social bookmarking sites) will generate different levels of traffic. Moreover, other people will re-post your links if they really like it at different rates depending on the platform.

As you consider social bookmarking for increasing your traffic and SEO, you'll want to make sure that you don't avoid the more mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. You'll likely still get more traffic from those sources so don't forget about them.

When you are submitting pages of your website to social bookmarking websites you want to make sure that you keep everything relevant. Don’t submit every page of your website to Digg or spam irrelevant links to Reddit. The best way to utilize social bookmarking sites is to utilize relevant content on your website. Say you have a blog post that is about home renovations; you could submit this to the “Home Improvement” category of StumbleUpon, or to a relevant subreddit (a subreddit is a category in Reddit) that focuses around home improvements or DIY projects.

Social bookmarking communities are very good about self-moderation. If you are pushing irrelevant content, your link will likely get deleted and your profile may be banned from posting. However, these websites have a plenty of traffic coming to them and, if the content is truly relevant, odds are it will get upvoted, shared, repinned, etc. This will bring a significant number of relevant users to your website.

Take 5 minutes and do some research as to which website(s) would be the best target for your social bookmarking efforts.

When was the last time you posted on your social media channels? I'm not talking about when you posted a picture on your personal Facebook page. I'm talking about on your company's social locations.

Too often, a business leader gets the idea that it will be important to start doing social media. They'll get the secretary to create the pages for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps a few others (Pinterest, YouTUBE, etc). They'll get the web guy to put the links on the website. They'll even take some time to post for the first week or two.

Then, the efforts will stop. Think of the Twitter accounts that started strong then just a week or two later there were suddenly no more tweets. Or, worse the accounts that simply have a bevy of automated posts. You know, when they post to one location and then have the interwebs taking care of the rest?

An inactive Facebook or Twitter page symbolizes that you simply don't care about the image of your company. If a user comes to your Facebook page in hopes of gaining a more in depth knowledge of your company or trying to find out about upcoming events but finds that the last post was made two years ago, that user will most likely not take you as seriously as another company that is maintaining an active presence on social media. Letting your social media presence wane shows lack of commitment, follow-through, and indicates you are just plain lazy.

In fact, it might be better to not have a social presence if you aren't going to maintain it.

Here are some easy status updates or tweets that can be posted in no time. These simple ideas will help keep your social media active and a good start to helping you become awesome.

1. Ask your audience a question to solicit engagement (don't forget to reply when they answer).
2. Talk about upcoming events and things your company is doing in the community.
3. Talk about new products or specials that your company is offering (don't do this exclusively or you will become a spammer).
4. Post about events in the community that everyone can enjoy (e.g. a local sporting event or a play coming to town).
5. Post pictures of company events or fun things happening in the office.

Posting something about the weather or even just saying, "Happy Friday!" will do more for your online brand than not posting at all. Remember, there is a huge difference between being on Facebook or Twitter and actually being active on social media.

Don’t let your online brand suffer from an inactive social media presence.

Perhaps you are new to Twitter or you've started seeing these strange #tags on your Facebook profile since Facebook finally started using them. Maybe you've never heard of hashtags or perhaps you are just confused about how to use them correctly.

Here is a quick background on hashtags and their purpose.

The # (pound) symbol, called a hashtag in social media, is traditionally used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. Twitter users created it as a way to call special attention to certain keywords in their tweets.

Now, Facebook is also using the hashtag.

• People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their tweet to categorize those tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search. E.g. Here is how you use a #hashtag.
• Clicking on a hashtag in any message in Twitter and Facebook shows you all other tweets or status updates marked with that keyword.
• Hashtags can occur anywhere in the post – at the beginning, middle, or end.
• Hashtags that become very popular in Twitter are often trending topics.
• Don't #spam #with #hashtags. Don't over-tag a single tweet or update. (Best practices recommend using no more than 2 hashtags per post.)
• Don't hashtag bomb. In other words, don't use a hashtag to pitch your message on a trending topic.
• Use hashtags only on posts relevant to the topic. (see previous bullet)
• Hashtags are for keywords and not words of emphasis or emotion. Good: I heart #narwhals - They make me feel gooey inside. Bad: I heart #narwals - #theymakemefeelgooeyinside. Worst: I #heart #narwhals - #they #make #me #feel #gooey #inside #lol.
• Hashtag is not an appropriate name for your newborn.

While hashtags did start on Twitter and now Facebook has joined the fray, some other social platforms have taken notice. A couple of them, such as Google+, Instagram and Flickr use a form of hashtags. I'm sure that more will jump on as they continue to increase in popularity.

A few months ago, I wrote a post titled, "You Can't Automate Social." Even though people do it all the time, they shouldn't. But, I know why people try.

Social media is hard.

Don't get me wrong, posting to one platform like your own Facebook account is easy. You simply say the first thing that comes to your mind (which you hopefully won't regret later).

Social media for business is very different than social media for personal. You have to step outside of your personal way of thinking and now think about your business and communicate that to very different audiences.

When thinking about the time it takes to post coherent meaningful messages to even just your main social networks it can be a very time consuming process. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can take a lot of time to post, monitor and manage. Now we add other platforms like Google+, Instagram, Vine, Trip Advsior, Yelp, Google Place Page, etc. and we need a team of marketers are required to even figure it all out.

I get it. Automation makes things so much easier. Posting something to just Twitter then having it automatically repost to Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps other locations sounds pretty compelling. It also becomes compelling to have automatic posts from your blog posts so that you don't have to do the work to tell people about the post you just spent 45 minutes putting together.

In my opinion, this is a lazy way to market your business. If social media is that important to you, then you shouldn't automate anything unless you have automated in such a way that still honors your audience.

For example:

The same message to all your platforms: bad.
Scheduling an audience specific message to each platform: good.

I thought I'd make an attempt to identify the common audience types for each of the three main networks. Understanding these audience types might help you understand why the same message for all three platforms is a really bad idea.

Twitter

Twitter started as a social network with the intention of just saying what you are doing right now. In fact, like Facebook, it's intent was to have your username as the subject of a sentence. You might still see people with this old school approach to tweets or status updates like: @corey_smith is drinking chocolate milk.

It didn't take long for Twitter to be more of a micro-blogging platform. Micro being the operative word. In 140 characters you can say everything you want. It leads to some bad spelling and grammar but it's intent is for you to be pithy or concise in your communication. It's not meant for diatribes. It forces brevity.

As a result, the audience expects that. They don't want to see a majority of your updates linking to other locations so they can finish reading your thoughts. They don't want to see long-winded discussions over multiple tweets.

The audience tends to be younger and a bigger fan of text messaging (although text messaging is 160 characters - traditionally). You'll find a greater level of tech savvy in your Twitter audience.

Because of this, your posts need to be very prescient. They need to talk about what is happening now and not dwell on the past. In 10 minutes, your audience will never see that post in their timeline so it has to count in the moment.

Facebook

Facebook users tend to be a bit more long-winded than Twitter users. This is not saying anything bad about Facebook users but they have the space to opine and therefore they do.

You'll find a greater quantity of images and videos in Facebook because the platform allows them.

While Twitter followers tend to be people you won't necessarily know, you are more likely to be connected to people you know in real life on Facebook. I know that's not always the case but if it's your personal profile, you are less likely to interact with people you don't know on your Facebook page than people you do know.

Facebook users expect a little more personal interaction and often tend to be less forgiving to political or religious rants. Your Facebook audience will tend to be more family oriented

Because of the way Facebook users interact, your posts have a greater likelihood of being seen long term. If your images are compelling and your video links are meaningful, your audience will be more likely to read longer posts. In fact, your posts can be more blog-like and text heavy and people will read them. However, pictures and videos are going to get you the best results.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the least social of these three social networks. LinkedIn has come a long way with their groups feature but it's still a bit complicated to track certain users. Part of that is because when it was originally built it was more of a giant Rolodex online and now has incorporated many of the successful elements from other social networks.

Your audience on LinkedIn will naturally have more of a business mindset. They are going to be more interested in talking about their industry or topics that will help them grow in their career. Because of this the two most common uses for LinkedIn are for sales professionals to connect with business owners and purchasing managers and in the job-recruiting field (both job seekers and recruiters).

Your content for LinkedIn on your personal page, your company page or in the groups should be more professionally driven. Your updates and posts can be short and concise like you might find on Twitter but it must be geared toward your professional audience.

Summing it up

When writing for your various social locations, make sure you understand your audience. Don't try to have a once size fits all approach. It's not a good idea and will just indicate that you are a lazy marketer.

Above all, no matter which audience you are writing for remember to pitch less and contribute more. No one likes that guy that's always pitching his product.

Don't be that guy.

Last year, I wrote "Tweet It Right: A CEO's Guide to Twitter" because I've had so many conversations with leaders in organizations that simply don't get the 'why' of Twitter.

Getting started on Twitter can feel like a daunting challenge. It can especially be a struggle if you haven't taken the time to become familiar with twitter.com. If you intend your brand to have a presence on Twitter, then you must take the necessary steps to complete your profile.

This is true for your personal Twitter page as well as your company or organization page. If you aren't telling people who you are properly, you'll find that those that follow you don't matter and you'll have less influence than you think.

Below are the first four items that you should take care of in regards to properly branding your Twitter account. If you take the time to do this when you set up your account at first then you should be set. However, too many people often don't.

• Profile Photo: Your profile image should be immediately identifiable with your brand, and can be your logo or some variation of your logo. Dimensions for your Twitter logo should be 73 pixels x 73 pixels.
• Bio: Your bio is the first thing you want people to know about your brand. You get 160 characters to introduce your brand to the world.
• Header Photo: Header photos are the newest introduction to branding on Twitter. Twitter recommends a ratio of 2 to 1, (e.g. 626 x 1252). Files cannot be larger than 5MB. Because your profile photo and bio are in the header, this one is not as important as the others; not as important if the rest of your profile is set up well.
• Background Photo: Your background photo can be used in a number of ways, including sharing additional information about your brand or sharing a strong image that you feel represents your brand. Make sure you use something unique and not one of the stock backgrounds that Twitter provides.

Understand that failing to set up your Twitter profile can signal potential followers that you look like a spammer. It may cause people to ignore or block you.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to properly utilizing twitter. Don’t be afraid to dive in and start tweeting!