Liz Ainsworth of Life By Design gave a great presentation that triggered fantastic conversation at the September Bootstrappers Breakfast in Milpitas.
Here are a few things that I gleaned from her presentation on social media.
- A small daily effort has a strong positive effect. Consistent execution of a small task 3-5 times a week yields large benefits over time.
- She grew her Facebook connection list from 300 to 4300 over about 6 months by sending a few personal invites five times a week, spending about 15 minutes a day.
- She posts about an activity she is taking part in related to health and wellness about five times a week. She prefers Facebook to twitter because the Facebook message format is longer than 140 characters and allows you to send short personalize note without having to resource to contractions and jargon.
- She also has a Facebook fan page for her business, where she will post more commercial messages, but she is very strict about keeping her personal communications strictly related to a health or wellness related activity she is taking part in.
- She writes in the first person on both her personal and fan pages and always has a point of view. She showed some examples of folks that she was following who were clearly writing in “press release speak” where they were talking about themselves in the third person. It was off putting compared to a short personal note.
- She budgets:
- 15 minutes twice a day for Facebook
- 15 minutes twice a day for E-Mail
- one hour a week for twitter, using SocialOomph to schedule her tweets for the week.
- one hour a week on her blog
- one hour a week on her newsletter
- Clearly her self-discipline and time management are a key part of her success.
- Her writing and other efforts seem to flow naturally from who she is as a person. Her commitment to self-improvement also came through very clearly in her talk and in her examples.