Week 3: Stepping up online engagement.

Welcome to Week 3 of our 8-week program! This week is all about increasing engagement online. By now, you have your own web presence, started to build an email list (and are sending our email newsletters), and have Twitter account. Now, it is time to engage online. Bottom line here is that you will need to find your audience when you start. Once you are established the growing audience will find you. Today, I am giving you my 10 essential rules of online engagement (with focus on Twitter). Enjoy and please let me know how things are going for you!

1. Do not use social media when hungry, tired, or upset. The temptations are too strong. One nasty/stupid/hurtful Tweet and there is a lot of damage you will need to control. Also chances are that if you are not at your best, you will use Twitter to sooth your mind self-medicate, which is not the same as building an online audience in a smart and targeted way.
2. Lift up, inspire, and thank others. In other words, try to avoid the usual tweets akin to "So proud and honored to be awarded the something something boring blablabla award". Rather, if somebody else provides something interesting or useful, thank them and distribute to your audience (retweet).
3. Follow as many voices as you can in your specific field. This will provide you with interesting content to distribute to your followers, inspire you, and also teach you what a good tone and style for your particular community is.
4. Give ample credit. Do not tweet images that you randomly found on the internet without giving appropriate credit to the artist or source of the image/content.
5. Mention other people (by including their twitter handle) who you think are interested in your content. This will draw them into the conversation and increase the reach of your message.
6. Post meaningful content that interests your audience. Do not waste your time with mundane and trivial things, there are already more than enough Twitter accounts that do that.
7. Do not be shy and approach people you respect on Twitter (such as for example authors of books/papers you read and liked). Great new connections can emerge from such interactions. You will be surprised by how many seemingly very famous and busy people will be willing to engage with you online, after all we are all playing the same game of increasing our audience.
8. Provide links that point to new content on your website.
9. Limit your time on social media to protect you mental health. Spending too much time on Twitter can easily get you trapped in an unhealthy state of chasing micro dopamine rushes from retweets and likes. Also, seeing seemingly everyone else on Twitter succeed and have a great life (not true, we all struggle in one or the other way) can be detrimental for your mental health. 
10. Do not install the Twitter app on your phone. See the rule above for why that is important.

I hope these ten rules will get you start and help you build your audience.

Good luck!

Take care,

Flavio