Below are six tips for executives who are looking to get started with social business.

1. Optimize your social media profiles. Spend the time to complete your social media profiles to align your online brand with who you are. Ensure that the basics like profile picture and other standard content are complete. You should also take advantage of attributes like background imagery and interests or summary sections to make your identity personal, unique and differentiated.

2. Regularly publish content. Publish, repurpose and reuse blogs, SlideShare presentations and video content that you create and from people and influencers that you find compelling.

3. Set goals for each social media channel. Set objectives for how often you will publish, where you will publish, how much time you will spend to promote content and what your engagement and reach goals are. Establish a personal discipline and plan to review your goals and degree of accomplishment at least monthly, and make changes as needed.

4. Share your knowledge and passions without the goal of reciprocity. The easiest thing to write about is your passions and what you know. Cultivating and writing about your core interests will make writing easier and more  genuine. A likely outcome will be that your audience will find you and share and contribute to the conversation.

5. Obtain feedback. Your network will provide feedback organically and through commenting, sharing and liking behaviors. Beyond the vanity metrics, take the time to ask and listen to trusted friends and colleagues for their qualitative feedback to better understand what types of content resonates. 

6. Ensure that your content is consumable on mobile. Your social network is on mobile. Ensure that your content is able to be accessed and consumed in the right context (time/device/place).

Insights

• Social executives are perceived as innovative and have a positive impact on their company’s reputation. Social executives put a face on and create a voice for an organization. If you have trepidation about social business, start with internal communications, but quickly find their external voice. 

• Become an original content creator. In addition to finding your writing cadence and creating blogs, consider creating a video, post it on YouTube and include it in your LinkedIn About section to give people a stronger sense of your brand and who you are. You can also repurpose your blogs by morphing them into SlideShare content.

• Remain authentic and transparent. Although trying something new and putting yourself out there can be daunting, you will likely find that your network will be more welcoming than anticipated. Stay true to who you are, listen to your network's feedback and find your personal voice and style.