Trevor Jahnke May 6th, 2015Social Media Professor MirrerTactical Tips and Tricks for Social Media SuccessJosh Ochs, founder of MediaLeaders.com and former marking executive at the Walt Disney Corporation, hosts a twenty minute vlog session for businesses and individuals looking to expand their audience reach via social media. Ochs begins his discussion with the quintessential question of how to reach your customer -- how to get inside the conversation hanging in their head. Stressing that the key to reaching your target effectively is to understand them on a psychographic level, Ochs lists a number of questions to ask the customers: What does your customer love? What does your customer hate? What do they fear? What annoys them? Who is their worst enemy? Who is their best friend? What is a positive force or belief they hold? What is a negative force or belief they hold? Who is their hero? And finally, what social networks are they on?Ochs then discusses the importance of getting your audience to engage with you, and to comment or like their posts on Facebook. The main goal of building and using social media is to activate your followers friends. People achieve this engagement by following a couple of steps. First, great messaging gets things started. Ochs means that your content needs to mean something to your audience. It needs to be topical and relevant, but also thought provoking, without alienating your audience. Creating interesting and relevant content leads to a another step: Fan engagement. Once your audience comments on your post, their friends and followers will see the engagement, and will, in turn, be activated to start following your brand or visit your brands website.The big takeaway from the first part is that great messaging is the key to making social media more effective for businesses. Instead of using technology or fancy buzzwords, those looking to expand their social networks should aim to be conversational. Ochs also recommends that those looking to build social networks craft each message in a separate document to review thoroughly, before posting it on the social media website. Taking this extra step to review in a non-internet platform will reduce errors -- which customers can and will view negatively and pick over. Oches recommended a formula on how to create interesting content: an image, followed by a question, then a call to action, finished with a link to either the website or webpage showcasing what you want the viewer to look at.Ochs recommended the practice of having others screen content before it is posted to further ensure that there will be no errors. A second or even third set of eyes can double check facts and grammar of the post to ensure that its good-to-post.Another tip Ochs mentions in this section of his lecture vlog is to not use the same messages for both Facebook and Twitter. The sites are different from each other, and as such, should be used with different goals in mind. The purpose of posting on Facebook.com is to get viewers to like or comment on your post which will open it up for their friends to also see the post and thereby spread the product and the companys message. The success of posting tweets and content on Twitter, is measured by what words or phrases are trending through the use of hashtags. In order for something to trend, there must be a lot of common hashtags that users across the world are utilizing to group related tweets together in an ongoing conversation. Hashtags are multiplied by the help of retweets and favorites -- those that are most successful in a certain amount of time gain global recognition in Twitters Whats trending section.Ochs compares the differences of Facebook and Twitter to Los Angeles and London. Both cities may speak English, but they also have different cultures with different phrases and words for certain objects. For example whats known as a bathroom in Los Angeles is called a loo in London. If you start talking about loos in Los Angeles, very few people will know what youre talking about.Ochs then discusses the recommended posting frequency for Facebook. Media companies post an average of seven times per day, while brands post on average once per day. Ochs believes that posting more than once is considered too much for fans. We recommend you behave more like a brand, he said. But if you are going to post more than once he also recommends that you space it periodically, such as once every 6 hours. Och recommends this timeline because Facebook uses an algorithm to calculate how often posts should be display in your followers' feeds. The algorithm takes the amount of views the post gets (also known as the Affinity) multiplies it times the amount of likes or comments it receives (also called the Weight) and then multiplies it by how long ago the post was created (which is labeled the Decay). [E=Ue*We*De]If Facebook users saw all of the posts for all of their friends, they might be overwhelmed and bored, which would lead to them tuning out the content. Losing user interest because of post oversaturation would be a disaster for Facebook, as the company needs eyes on pages to earn revenue.Ochs goes on to talk about how to get noticed by more fans. A message is more likely to show up in a customers news feed if people they know have been interacting with the user or message recently. Ochs cites his studies, which have shown that links are favored over status updates. Interestingly enough, the same study illustrated that photos/videos trump links when it comes to attention garnered from an audience. When it comes to success on facebook, Ochs says the ideal is to post five to ten times per week (any more than twice a day is way too much), moniter comments on all content (check back thirty minutes after post), encourage fans to instantly like and comment on your post (when they engage with your post it triggers the algorithm to push faster in the stream and it becomes viral quicker), and finally add/update photo albums (pictures have a lasting affect on Facebook and followers will look through them long after the campaign is over).When it comes to Twitter, Ochs recommendation is to schedule two to seven tweets per day, and to schedule them ahead of time. This will allow your team to collaborate and have remote access to your messages. Also, dont rely on just one access point (ex: computer or phone) to your social media.Ochs also offers a tactical tip so it can make it easy for followers to click on all the links. He recommends Twitter users remove the www. and just leave the link with http:// instead as this will create a hyperlink for every URL.Ochs finished the presentation by saying what not to do on Twitter. He says that people shouldnt pre-program tweets more than once every 15 minutes. Instead, Ochs recommends to do it once every 30-60 minutes. Next, he said to never fly by the seat of your pants and to plan the message unless a person or business is retweeting existing content from another Twitter user. When the individual or business does retweet, they shouldnt use more than 100 characters and dont respond to negative comments. Ideal tweets should be bright, lighter, and polite. To finish, he mentions the importance of clarity, and warns against posting convoluted or unclear content. Engage people by telling a story about a product, service, or topic. For example: dont just tweet OMG! I cant believe this! and then insert the link because this doesnt give the followers any idea what theyre clicking on. Instead tweet Ive never seen a dog on a skateboard B4 then put the link.Thanks to Josh Ochs I feel like I learned a vital tool to using social media in the working world and with graduation creeping up on me I might need to use these techniques soon so I felt that all of this will come in handy someday.