I was astounded recently to add up all of my social media communities. When people have asked me along the way, I’ve thrown them a number of ‘about 5,000 combined’ in my social networks. But talk about under-selling myself! When I did a thorough tally up, I was gobsmacked. It was far greater than that. How much exactly? Read on…

Firstly please know that by writing this post, I’m not doing it to brag. I’m saying it to encourage you to also do a little tally up of your combined social networks. Perhaps you will also be pleasantly surprised. You see as you continue the online journey, its quite possible you have established social networks in a few places, and without even putting in too much effort, you may well be amassing an audience in a corner of the internet you haven’t paid much attention to lately. So it’s high time you did a little reconciliation of your affairs.

How I approached the tally

For those of you who read my blogs regularly, you know I like to share the templates I devise and use for what I do, so below (provided you give me your details first), I’m more than happy to share the exact spread sheet I devised to tally up my social reach.

Using this spreadsheet, I started off with the usual suspects — Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter profiles. Lots of people have those these days. That’s pretty obvious. But then I remembered I also had several Facebook company pages (The Creative Collective, awardshub.com, Social Media Super Hero), two LinkedIn company pages (awardshub.com and The Creative Collective) which way too many companies in Australia don’t which is madness, several Twitter profiles (The Creative Collective, awardshub and my personal one @yradams).

 

Once that was completed I remembered that there were other pages on Facebook was the owner of. For instance I look after my partner’s building business Facebook page (prontobuild), and have a bunch of Facebook pages for our various programs (Get Up To Speed, Accelerate, and Get On Track). Already I was getting myself to a pretty tidy number.

 

Don’t forget the less obvious ones

I didn’t think I had many subscribers on YouTube, but it is a social network, so best we include it, so I was gobsmacked to find over 360 subscribers to my channel, which I will admit have been achieved with very little effort other than throwing up some videos on a fairly regular basis (monthly-ish, sometimes more regularly), and being diligent about giving them appropriate titles and descriptions, thanks to great tips I’ve picked up from Zoe Wyatt, our social media specialist, at her incredible One Day Video Marketing courses.

Then of course there is the more recent Google+ pages of which I have a profile

+ 2 business pages (The Creative Collective and awardshub) which I reminded myself upon checking I really must put some more more effort into.

And then there is the fast-growing social network Pinterest on which I have a personal and business page (if you didn’t know Pinterest has had business pages since late last year, you must come along to one of our Pinterest workshops), and a lesser known Quora, on which I have a personal profile + business page.

Using a simple sum formula in the total row, I was gobsmacked to discover that as of this month, I have a combined social network of over 18,000. Not too shabby at all and something I really do marvel at, when I think back to the days pre social media, and how long it took to build an email database of this size (a few years).

 

Cudos to Zoe

I have to say, if it wasn’t for my long association with our amazing social media specialist Zoe Wyatt, it is highly unlikely I’d have the social media reach I do today. Whilst my combined social networks pales in comparison to hers (which totals well over 65,000), I am so fortunate to have attended a lot of social media training she has run over the years, and also participating in our awesome Social Media Success Squad.

The other secret to my success is I’ve actually put into place what she’s taught me. Like anything, it’s one thing to learn something, but quite another to apply it, which is why I believe we’re onto a winning formula with our BYO Laptop training sessions where you actually bring your laptop and work live on your account on the day, with full support and guidance. For a list of upcoming dates and topics and locations, see this link.