My baby steps with Toronto social media scene

I will be upfront that I am not an expert or anywhere near in social media. I know how it works in theory, but implementation been lagging I just don’t seem to have enough patience or maybe my strategy is just wrong and I need to hire social media specialists. In my mind I compare every life situation with either driving on highway (don’t ask I have a whole theory) or martial arts training, so I figured that social media is like martial arts – never happens overnight, takes practice and lots of patience.
That is a reason why I feel very happy even when I make small steps to improve my social media profile and skills. I did two things in last couple of days to improve:

Twitter:
It seems that everybody on the net talks and uses Twitter these days. I’ve been slow in using it and only have 56 updates – partly due to a simple fact that I had no followers. However, now when T4C is near its completion it is time to reach out to the public of Toronto, I said to myself, it is time to start actually using Twitter. Now, I know that my approach is totally wrong – I should have been developing relationships and followers along the way and now it will take some time till I build creditability with the community and actually benefit from Twitter – but hey, it is better late than never right?

So I did two things:

1) I installed Twitter – Facebook application. What it does is copies my Twitter updates to Facebook, I don’t think it works in reverse. This allows me to tap into more developed Facebook network while building up my Twitter account as well. I think this is a first step one should do.

2) Now before I go to sleep I go to search.twitter.com and search for terms relevant to T4C it is amazing how many people are on Twitter from Toronto while nobody around me doesn’t even know what Twitter is. I read through first two pages and check out interesting people. I don’t want to follow each and everyone, because then really it will be impossible to follow all of them. So I click on user profiles, check out their updates and their blog or website. If a person is interesting – I follow. Then – magic this people start following me as well. So in a day I grew my followers from 8 to 30.

I know that mastering Twitter is a slow process and I also need to bring value to people who follow me and not just promote my content. That is why I am going to take my time to develop this relationship and gradually grow the readership. I think next step would be to get custom designed Twitter page and participate more in conversation of people I follow already.

Toronto Food Blogs
Really there is no direct competition to T4C ( and that is why we started the project), but it doesn’t mean somebody is not starting the same project and you still have to follow other players in the industry. From my perspective the nearest to us in topic are food blogs and entertainment guides. Finding major ones is pretty easy, but how do you go deeper? I used a system that I read from Dave’s Fleet blog :Practical 101s: Google Reader And Persistent Search . So I set a brand new Google account, so it doesn’t mix with the regular feeds I read and set up a system that monitors every media company in Toronto I could think about as well as keywords like “Toronto Restaurants” or “Toronto Dates.”
Yesterday I logged in to this account and scanned the 660 feeds that appeared over there in a matter of 10 min I found 15 local Toronto blogs that are dedicated to food – I was amazed, because I couldn’t find them before when I was doing the research for my business plan.

Now these new websites that I discovered could be our competition or in opposite could become our content partner – you never know. What I do know that as a professionals in what we do – we just have to keep on eye on what these guys do and try to develop a relationship with them where everyone will benefit.

So here they are – my baby steps in social media. I think I will spend more time with blogs and Twitter for now, and not going to use use Stumble or Digg anytime soon – because I want to be authentic and that requires time and patience.

Tags: features, social media, toronto business