In the third part of her series on social media skills, Colette Mason provides some tips on finding your social media voice and how to present yourself.

In this article, we’re focusing on one thing I found very difficult when I started using social media to market my products and services.

I seemed to spend ages getting off the ground, trying to work out what I wanted to say. I worried a lot about how I was going to be perceived. I remember thinking, "What could I possibly say that other people would be even remotely interested in?"

"I did some work on personal branding which I found useful, since I tend to use social media to promote my business as 'me as an individual' for a lot of the time."

I wanted to be genuine to boost my credibility and to reflect my true personality. I didn’t want to fake anything. But I worried how that might work out for me. I didn’t want to be too boring, or too outrageous.

I didn’t want to seem flippant and unprofessional. I didn’t want to be too distant, aloof and difficult to contact. I didn’t want to look like social media had taken over my life. I didn’t want to disappear when I got stuck.

I didn’t want to say something that could be horrendously misconstrued and turn into an episode I would later regret. I didn’t want to be a lone voice in the wilderness with no-one responding to what I posted.

I kept going round in circles, trying to work out what to say and what not to say. I didn’t really get it straight in my head for three long months. (That painful delay and anxiety was one of the reasons I wrote this course – to spare other people this hassle.)

In the end, I stumbled across the answer to all those problems quite by accident. I did some work on personal branding which I found useful, since I tend to use social media to promote my business as "me as an individual" for a lot of the time.

One of the best parts of that personal branding research came about when I stumbled on a list of adjectives that can be used to describe a business, in straightforward, easy-to-understand terms.

I used these ideas to help me work out the balance between being personal and professional, and to work out what sort of emotions to use in my updates. Pick five of the following emotions you feel comfortable being associated with and check your updates match these concepts.

How we want to be perceived by our social media followers

When you are doing your status updates, make sure they tie in with the personality, the human angle, you want to put across. Again, you can look at some of the dominant companies on social media and see how they are coming across, and find one you feel comfortable with and use that as a starting point.

In the next article in the series, we’ll look at how you stand out from the crowd in social media.

The social media skills series so far:

Part one: social media for technophobes
Part two: how to identify your social media goals
 

Colette Mason runs an international online consultancy which shows businesses and entrepreneurs how to use the internet and social media to boost their business online. Colette has a background in IT, which started in support and development and moved on to usability and online marketing techniques, and is author of latest social media guide Social Media Success in 7 Days. For more information visit: www.socialmediasuccessin7days.com.