6 golden rules for ensuring your social campaign has a great digital footprint

Believe it or not, if you want your social media campaign to be successful, it is crucial that you understand that everything you do online is public. Every blog post, every tweet, and every update adds to the total sum of your “digital footprint” and your reputation online.

If you are new to the open and connected world of social media, always try to put your best foot forward when posting or sharing something online. Your digital footprint is what you leave behind online and what others will see about you. This plays a massive role to increase your online reputation and creates more brand awareness for your business.

If you are still scared to take the mighty plunge into Web 2.0, here are a couple of rules that will help you build up your digital footprint.

1. Always be yourself
This is the most important part of any social media campaign. It means being transparent, truthful, sharing in an honest way, and only being yourself about what you believe in and who you are. Never start your social media campaign for just self-promotion. The same rules apply online as offline. If you are genuine with yourself and with others, people will start to trust you, and with this real connections can be developed.

2. Be proactive
Most of the time social media is real-time, therefore you have to be proactive with your campaign. Respond publicly and positively to any new mentions you are getting in a personal tone. This will include emails and direct messages.

You can also start mentioning other people who can in return mention you in a public and positive way and thereby getting more positive exposure.

3. Stay engaged
By participating and commenting in the conversation happening, you can easily generate awareness about what you are doing. When you are following someone on the social media channels that you are using, sharing interesting content to your network, commenting on a blog post, retweeting, like a fan page, or social bookmarking someone else’s content, you are giving these people a gift and might return the favour.

4. Acknowledge others
If you refer people on a social media channel, whether it is on Facebook, Google+, Twitter or even Pinterest, it is best if you thank or acknowledge them by linking to their blog post or profile. Everybody works hard online to make a name for themselves, whether it’s with social networking, writing or creating magnetic content, everyone wants to be recognised for their efforts.

5. Be helpful
We are all using social media to make a big difference. The more helpful you are to others by sharing information, answering questions, providing help, the more others will be willing to help you in return. It is really as easy as that.

6. Stay humble
One of the first rules you learn when you are young was to say thank you and please. Manners work online exactly as they work offline. Thank new people who joined your network, thank people for sharing your content to their own network or commenting on the content that you have provided. You can thank them by their name and doing so publicly — this will make a difference to their lives because they will feel like you really value their efforts and that they are important to your business.

Social media campaigns shouldn’t be seen as just a physical marketing initiative. What you share online adds to your digital footprint and it says a lot about how you do business. Do you want your digital footprint to be negative?

Follow the steps above to help you build your reputation online with what you are leaving behind on the web.