Tweeting my Facebook!

I had the opportunity during the summer to go to Beijing for the 2nd YPARD China Conference. It was a weeklong trip, got to see some tourist sites (although I`m not really the touristy type), meet some great people and reconnect with others.

I gave a few speeches, had meetings with a few Heads of CAAS (the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences). But the best part of my trip wasn`t either of these. It was the social media training that I was asked to give to the YPARD China team.

There are a few differences between what social media means in China and what does it mean in the rest of the world. If you can`t connect through a VPN, you don`t have access to major networks like Facebook for example. But similarities exist and I did my best to find and explain them properly.

I won`t go into much of the content presented there or on the comments and questions that I received. It was, after all, a couple of hours long training. But what I saw people enjoy the most was that I used myself as a bad example of how social media should not be used. I showed the participants my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles (screenshots) and explained what I`m doing wrong. Actually it was a kind of self-analysis for my also.

I only prepared the screenshots, not the speech. Together with the participants, I went through I`m doing wrong. And their comments and questions were real helpful. Here are some mistakes that I`m doing on social media:

– I used a lot of scheduled content through RSS feeds (especially on Twitter and Facebook) and I cannot control the form of this content. Thus, many times I get a link with a picture from an organization and no title or description of what that means. I really need to fix this;

– I do not publish regularly on this blog, although I would like to. But you can`t schedule inspiration. I should make it a habit of publishing on the same day/s of the week;

– I do not engage with my followers on Twitter very often, but I publish my content. I should do this more: engage in discussions with my followers and with the people I follow;

– On LinkedIn, I rarely get into group discussions, publish on my blog there (mostly reblogged from here) or comment on status updates from my friends;

These are just a few and the list goes on. I`ll try my best to fix all these.