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A few of us were lucky enough to catch Guy Kawasaki at Stanford University recently for a short and informative session on the Art of Social Media.

For the uninitiated, Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley-based author, speaker, entrepreneur, and evangelist; he is also currently serving as the Chief Evangelist of Canva, a popular online graphic design tool. The 1 hour session was informative, humorous, and largely insightful. Here are some tips that Kawasaki shared with us on utilizing social media as both a business and branding tool, as well as the art of effective communication.

On photo editing and choosing profile pictures

Kawasaki kickstarted the entire session with a how-to on optimizing profile pictures on social media channels to appear more professional. He advocated the importance of having a proper profile picture for all your social networks. To illustrate his point, he gave a few bad examples and contrasted with an example of what should be done instead. To list a few:

• Your profile picture should comprise of mainly your face
• Asymmetry in the photo
• No use of backlighting
• Use the same photo for all channels

This is to project a consistent personal brand and image on all of your social media channels and to also allow people to search and identify you easily. This is especially so for some of us with very common names (i.e. David Lim for example) where different photos used for Facebook and LinkedIn would create confusion.

Although some may disagree, Kawasaki is largely coming from a professional standpoint and stresses the importance of consistency. This picture should also bring across feelings and sentiments that you want people to perceive. For example, a photo of you smiling would allow others to perceive you as friendly and inviting. Being dressed in a suit and tie would convey a serious connotation to that image.

From the perspective and use of cover photos, the same aforementioned principles apply. However, it is more common for cover photos to be used and told as narratives instead. Using his own cover photo as an example, Kawasaki explained that his intention is for others to perceive him as being warm, friendly, yet serious, and someone of great importance (referenced to his personal connection with Richard Branson).

Another quick tip would be to always keep in mind the ABC rule. Always Be Cropping! Crop unnecessary portions of your picture to reduce the amount of noise in the story that you are trying to convey. It is our duty to utilize tools to aid in our social media craft.

On pitches and presentations

I’m sure that most of us by now have heard of the famed 10/20/30 rule as evangelized by Kawasaki. As a Venture Capitalist himself, he has heard hundreds of pitches and was sick of lousy ones.

Basically, when it comes to pitching and presentations, utilize the rule as such:

Ten slides.

Your entire concept should be contained within ten slides. Beyond that, most people wouldn’t be able to comprehend your presentation.

Twenty minutes.

Kawasaki feels that too much time is wasted trying to setup and account for things that might go wrong. It would be good to allocate twenty minutes for unexpected circumstances and overrun the discussion if need be.

Thirty-point font.

This is to improve readability and reduce the amount of text on your slide. Think Apple. A rule of thumb that he uses is to divide the age of the oldest person in the room by half to determine the font size.

Other tips include making your slides black to look more serious and is easier to read as well. Although I must say that such a use-case is highly contextual, I agree that having white text over a black background always looks better than if it was vice versa.

On social media

With prior experience in marketing internships, I find this point on Twitter particularly intriguing.

Most marketers would normally advocate tweeting between 3–6 times a day. Kawasaki, however, recommends retweeting each piece of his content at least 3 times, stretched at least 8 hours apart. A typical day for him would include posting about 70–80 times a day on Twitter!

Before we raised our hands in disbelief, Kawasaki quickly explained himself. The common argument against posting so regularly is that it would clutter the Twitter Feed and annoy the hell out of your followers. But the logic is that out of all of Kawasaki’s followers, there are probably only about 10–20 who rant about his habit. With a million followers on Twitter, that makes the amount of pissed off people only 0.001%. In exchange, Kawasaki nearly gets three times the visibility in terms of impressions on Twitter.

So the choice is yours to make — to annoy 0.001% of your followers to capture three times the number of impressions, or simply please all of your followers and tweet each piece of content only once. I would say that the data doesn’t lie.

Some other useful tips:

• It is useful to use tools like Buffer to post and schedule content for effective coverage.
• A less known fact is that you could add up to 4 photos to a Tweet and this will greatly help in covering a story to your post.
• It is good to spend some time to upload videos natively to Facebook as this will generate greater viewability and readability as compared to embedding a link to YouTube, for instance. If you were Mark Zuckerberg, which format would you support?

On experimenting

One of the last, but possibly the most important, piece of advice that he gave was to always experiment. Although many guides have been written for social media platforms, ultimately it is all just a guessing game. There is no right or wrong when it comes to social media marketing. Kawasaki encouraged us to do what we think is right and to follow what others have already proven. But never, ever stop trying new techniques and engagement methods!

What are some other social media branding tips you live by? Drop them in the comments below!

This post was originally published at: techinasia. Image via: wikimedia.