How to Use Social Media to Build Your Personal Brand Meetup

It was a dark and stormy night when a few hardy souls turned out for Rebecca Coleman’s November 3rd presentation, How to Use Social Media to Build Your Personal Brand Meetup for Travel Writers, at the BCATW Meetup.

Coleman is an avid foodie with a healthy wanderlust, and shares her adventures on her personal blog, Cooking by Laptop, and is a regular contributor to Vancity Buzz.

She has written 3 books, which help newbies create a marketing plan using social networking as a tool. She instructs courses in Social Media Marketing and blogging at BCIT, and travels internationally giving workshops.

The Meetup was composed of mostly BCATW members who wanted to know more about how to use social media. Coleman delivered tips by the bucketload while keeping up with the questions and answers.

She was kind enough to post her Powerpoint presentation on the BCATW Facebook page, but there were some takeaways I noted.

How to Use Social Media

• Pick three social media platforms to focus on
• Don’t autopost from your WordPress blog as it doesn’t always present well and sends the same message to all platforms
• Facebook is tricky and not alway reliable in the way their algorithm works. Their newsfeeds get throttled
• Use social media hashtags that relate to something, not what you make up
• Use Twitter to research travel stories using geo-based, airport hashtags like PDX for Portland.
• Asking questions is a good way to get comments and information
• Commenting on other, related blogs is a good way to give your site a backlink

Our host Randi Winter said she’d heard that using the word, “Congratulations” in a Facebook post will boost its circulation. Days later this story, Facebook Hacks, supported that.

And, there was much more information about how to use social media, which you can read in Coleman’s Power Point Presentation. Thanks Rebecca!

The next BCATW Meetup has not been formally announced, but please save the date of December 11, 7-8:30 pm if you would like to learn more about how to use WordPress.

The Meetup will be an upload party where we’ll upload our professional information to the BCATW’s upcoming online directory at BCATW.org. More details soon!