You might not have heard of Social.me yet. The service, which just launched a few days ago, had already captured some influential users during its invite-only phase and is now open to the public.
Focused on aggregating all of your social networks in one page (34 of them are supported as I write this), here’s why I think everyone focused on building a personal brand should reserve their username now!
Reference all of your social networks from one place.
No fluff, no ads, and no pages cluttered with status updates – just a clean profile that directs people to the social networks you’ve set up so they can follow you. As someone who uses social media for both personal branding and professional engagement for my eCommerce clients, one thing is certain: you have no idea what your audience’s preferred social network is. Traditionally you would set up a Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn business page, and in some cases niche social networks like Pintrest or Instagram and promote engagement across them all. Services like Hootsuite will help unify your message across the major social networks, but before Social.me nothing really existed outside of your own website to promote the fact that you have a presence on those networks to your clients.
One username instead of many.
If you were fortunate enough to get the same preferred username across all of your social networks, consider yourself lucky! I was able to get @ronrule on Twitter and LinkedIn, but it turns out there’s another guy named Ron Rule out there who grabbed the name on Facebook before me so I had to go with a different one. And Google+ just gives you some random number, making it mildly annoying to share your profile with anyone. If you’ve set these networks up in Social.me, you can hot-link directly to the network without ever showing your Social.me profile (example: http://social.me/ronrule/googleplus will take you right to my Google+ page).
If you’re sending users to your Social.me page, or linking directly to the network through your Social.me page, your username on the social networks you’re linked to isn’t as important since they’re just clicking through.
Your business card is too small and your e-mail signature is too long.
At one point I had a seven line e-mail signature, displaying my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and a couple other mainstream profiles. It looked ridiculous, and trying to fit them all on a business card was impossible. I typically unify my message across all of them, so I decided that Twitter was the most convenient to share and dropped the others from my outbound communication. Within a year, my twitter following soared to over 11,000 while the other networks remained fairly stagnant in spite of pushing out the same content to all of them. Now all of my social networks are on one page – social.me/ronrule – and visitors can follow on the network of their choosing.
The unspoken SEO benefit.
The expertise tags link directly to your blog or website. That’s a free inbound link from a reputable site, in a highly visible area.
It supports a LOT of social networks!
In addition to the major social sites, there are a ton of smaller niche ones available too; Delicious, 500px, Model Mayhem, Meetup, Reddit, Newsle, Yahoo, Soundcloud, and Foursquare to name a few. If you’re building a personal (or professional) brand and have a presence on multiple social networks, you can share them all from your social.me page instead of marketing them individually. And if you’re a Skype user, visitors can even click the Skype icon on your profile to call you.
There’s no reason not to, really.
When you get down to it, there’s no reason not to at least set up a profile and reserve your Username so no one else takes it. Besides, why wouldn’t you want another link to your blog or website? Even if you aren’t wildly popular in social media, your career path may take you down this road one day and you’ll be kicking yourself if someone else out there with the same name as you got it first. Plus, Social.me is a great domain for referring people to your social profiles; everyone who sees it on your business card or email signature will instantly know what to expect there, even if they’ve never heard of it.
Analytics.
Ever wonder how many people actually click the social media icons on your website? Unless you’ve manually created each link and set up outbound click tracking, you have no way of seeing this information. With Social.me’s one-line Javascript, you’ll be able to see how often it’s viewed and clicked, and where your visitors are coming from. These stats will be available within the next two weeks.
So why are you still reading this? You should be reserving your Social.me username now. It takes less than two minutes.
Oh, and I almost forgot my favorite feature: there’s no username or password to remember. You just sign in using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
