When I think about my social media day, it always starts with wondering how I can reach the maximum number of people with my brand message. As a consequence, I'm always working on novel ways to promote myself, my brand and my personal product to my social media communities.
From a wacky YouTube video to a great new online find, to clever sourcing of content curation, the quest to find new and improved ways to reach out is forever buzzing inside. As part of this ongoing search, I have encountered what can only be described as heavenly online assistants; those Cross Platform Promotion (or CPP) tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck that allow me to literally sweep the social media universe with a single brush stroke (or perhaps that should be mouse-click!).
CPP, a term that my husband Dean and I coined in our latest book, Zero to 100,000, is the action of utilizing social media so as to enable it to spread content across various platforms simultaneously. It is truly a holistic approach to social media adoption and one that saves both precious time and resources.
CPP enables those in the 'know' to appear ever-present in the social media universe, but this doesn't mean its users can switch off. In fact, if exploited and abused, CPP can prove to be your worst social media enemy. Yes, your messages are broadcast across all the platforms and hopefully positively acknowledged through retweets, reposts, links and so on, but this is the time when you need to stop basking in the glory of your CPP-enabled efforts and instead focus upon engaging and building upon the rewards your have reaped.
Remember that engagement is key to your long-term success and never allow yourself to grow too big for your social media boots! It's that age old tale (told in numerous pre-social media realms) of self-gratification and narcissism bred from achieving great adulation from afar. It's a fairytale, but it's also a cautionary tale. CPP is like a Pandora's box of easily squandered opportunity. If you choose to open it be sure to understand that, with your new popularity comes a new responsibility.
But it's not all doom and gloom - far from it in fact. CPP is a blessing to those who choose to embrace all that social media has to offer and are willing to give as much as they get on the social circuit.
CPP is, in essence, a saving grace for those of us who rely on social media as a route to promotion and, let's face it, who doesn't these days? The applications that enable it are allies in a crowded new universe and they make our voyage into it just that little bit easier.