I say this all the time… ‘talk about others 10 times more than you talk about yourself’. And that is more true now than ever. I may have heard that from Chris Brogan or some other thought leader in the social media space, but it just makes good common sense regardless of who said it.
And it’s not easy. We are all pretty vain creatures I think and everyone loves to talk about themselves. So it takes alot of effort to adhere to this one. But there is one thing you can do to evaluate how you are doing. For example, on your Facebook wall do this: take a sheet of paper and draw 2 columns. On the left side write down the number of times on your Facebook wall that you posted something about yourself or your business. You know, things like… ‘look at this thing that I did’… ‘come check out our new product’… etc. On the right side of the paper write down the number of posts that you talked about others. What do the numbers look like?
Are you starting to get the picture? Do you like hanging around someone who only talks about themselves? Yeah, you don’t want to be that person. Nobody likes that person. So talk about others more than you about yourself. People gravitate to that. If you have a Twitter account it is even easier to evaluate because there is a website that will look at your tweets and tell you what you are talking about. I did this on my own account and it wasn’t pretty. I gotta follow my own advice more closely. Try it yourself: http://tweetpsych.com/ and be prepared for the disappointment!
So what types of things can you say and do to talk about others more? Here are some examples:
That by no means is a definitive list, but I hope you get the point. The bottom line is this… post more things with the word ‘you’ and less things with the word ‘me’. It will work, I promise.
