I have stated before that I joined the world of social media to promote my Nia business.  Nia has been around for almost 30 years, but not a lot of people know about it.  It did not have the marketing push of Zumba.  Nia is a fitness/wellness practice that includes a cardio dance workout.  I grudgingly joined FaceBook, Twitter, Wellsphere, Merchant Circle, Yelp, Youtube, and many more to share things about health and wellness, and yes primarily Nia.  What happened, of course, was I found friends on FB both new and ones I had lost touch with.  I made friends through my blog and other people’s blogs.  I connected with many people on Twitter.  With all of these real friend connections I often get distracted with conversations on these social media sites.  But then again, I don’t really think of them as distractions because these are my friends now.  They might be people I may never meet face-to-face, but I care about them and — lucky me — they care about me.  But I do still have to try to learn things.  Today I listened to a Guinness World Record-breaking webinar hosted by HubSpot and presented by Dan Zarrella .  It was really interesting.  He shared how a lot of things you might hear are myths.

The presentation was labelled “The Science of Social Media”.  I guess the “science” came in because Mr. Zarrella compiled a bunch of figures from research.  I am gonna share some of the things he stated that I found interesting. Ok – really I am stating interesting facts off the slides because he talked so fast I missed a lot of what he said.  AND they had an earthquake in Virgina before the webinar and it was felt where the presentation was taking place.  They said the audio was having issues because of the earthquake.  But when Mr. Z slowed down, it was fine.

He had a lot of charts graphs and all types of things explaining how he came to these conclusions and these were the times when his rate of speech doubled so I think he was very excited about how he came up with this info but it also made it very hard to understand.  But . . . this provides a great opportunity for me to let you know that Hubspot is going to post the webinar so you can listen to it yourself.  I am just pointing out some highlights and what I got out of it.  It is always better to listen to the source when you have the opportunity.

Here are three myths:

– Engaging in the conversation is the most important thing.

From what I understood, he was saying this is not true IF you were trying to get huge exposure.  We are all on social networks for our own reasons.  So this MIGHT be a true fact for you, but in Mr. Z’s context he was saying it is NOT the most important thing when you are trying to get exposure.

– Don’t call yourself a guru.

His research showed people calling themselves gurus had HUGE followings.  So as long as you follow up your “guru” claim with good/valuable info you can call yourself that.

– Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are bad days to publish.

He said he found this not to be true.  He explained people can spend much more time on things (posts, links, e-mail, etc) because there is less traffic on those days.  So it sounds as if so many people believe this to be true so they don’t publish on those day which actually makes it false.

Additional points:

– Highly followed accounts tweet a lot of links.
Well, for me as a follower, if that is all that I see in a twitter stream I usually don’t bother following.  So, as I said, we all use social media for our own purposes so not all of his information applies to everyone.  He was sharing what his research showed by the numbers he studied.

– Don’t tweet “over” yourself. 
If you tweet out a link or information, let it set a bit. Give people time to see it before you tweet more information.  Some of this I think you just learn as you go.

– Don’t talk about yourself too much and
– Positive tweets and posts are what people want to read
These two points I thought were funny because I think of them as obvious as the sky.  But maybe it was stated for people living under a rock.  And there is a fine line, which was not actually addressed.  I think the fine line would be more educational.  I mean, people DO want to hear about you as a person, but how much is the question.  And people also don’t care to read false positives.  I mean life does have some negative aspects and sometimes it is ok to share them.  Again, the question is: how much?

– Write to the 5th grade level.
Regardless of what your audience’s education level may be this is a widely used level.

– Asking for a retweet works.
He said when you ask nicely for followers to retweet or share they do.

These are highlights of what I found most interesting.  There was a lot of information to support the busting of each myth, but that information you can hear when you listen to the webinar yourself.  You’ll will want to, if you have time and you are interested in learning more about social media.  HubSpot is a great tool for learning about social media.  They often have free webinars and downloads.  You might want to visit their site to see all they have to offer.  Thanks again, HubSpot and Mr. Dan Zarrella, as always I received some great info from you!

Here is the link to the webinar, http://www.hubspot.com/science-of-social-media-thanks/