Everyone wants to be better. We want to look better, feel better, perform better, get better results, etc…. I’ve fallen into this category and as I’ve realized as I’ve  interacted with thousands of people via social media over the last couple years, I’m not the only one. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with focusing on improving yourself – after all, we can do some amazing things when we improve ourselves.

Lately, I’ve had a few things on my mind though. It all hit me last week when I was having a conversation with a friend. I was lamenting about all these little problems I have in my life and how I felt life is sometimes unfair. Looking back, it’s not even proper to call these things “problems” when what they’re really just  ”annoyances”. Then I looked over at him and joked that he was the wrong person to complain to. In a few weeks, he’s going into the hospital for a couple months for cancer treatment. He’s not the only person I know that’s been having what I refer to as “real problems.” I know people that are going through serious relationship issues (not just a break-up), financial problems (the kind that cause you to lose your home) and other things that dwarf the types of problems I have.

I think this personal development culture is great in so many ways as there’s nothing better than people working together to help everyone reach their goals. On the flip side, I think sometimes we focus on the wrong things thinking they will bring us happiness. I get emails every day claiming to get me thousands of Twitter followers, likes on my Facebook page or visitors to my website. I also get the emails that claim to help me make thousands of dollars each week, turn me into an incredible lover or help me lose those “difficult pounds.”

There’s a song called “The Man I Want to Be” by Chris Young that I think drives the point home. The song is about a guy who messed up and wants his lady back. There are a lot of songs like this (especially country songs) but what differentiates this one from the others is that he wants to be a better man for her benefit, not for his own. You can watch the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWcs1GmJRQs

So what I did was think about how I could be a better person, not just for me but for those around me. I came up with four areas that I want to get better at. For each of them, I came up with the first rule that came to mind and listed it. They are:

1. Honesty – Don’t say things that aren’t true.
2. Respect – Don’t say something about someone that I wouldn’t say to their face.
3. Integrity – Live by the values I claim to live by.
4. Dependability – Do what I promise to do.

While I don’t violate these rules regularly, there is definitely room for improvement. So what I plan to do over the next four weeks is focus on each of these areas and do a quick blog post about what I’ve learned, what I’ve struggled with and how I plan to keep working at it. I have no idea how this will turn out from a blogging standpoint, but I hope to end up with a better me.

1. Plan Your Route:

It’s tempting to rely on your GPS, but at the very least, search for the interview site the day before using online maps such as Google Maps, MapQuest or Bing Maps. If you take just five minutes looking at the route (and another minute or two to print out the directions in case your GPS can’t find a signal), you can save yourself a lot of frustration.

Also, if you have an older GPS, the maps may not be current so it’s good to research the route ahead of time. If possible, do a test run to the location during the same time of day so you can estimate how much travel time you need.

2. Dress for Success:

The morning of an interview is a bad time to choose an outfit. Pick your outfit a day or two before and make sure it’s clean and neat. If it has stains, holes, doesn’t fit right or has any other problems, at least you have some time to get a new outfit.

Remember that you should always dress professionally for an interview. If you’re not clear what the appropriate dress is, ask the person setting up the interview or a recruiter in your field. Some basic tips:

• Your outfit should be clean, neat, fit well and have no wrinkles.
• Cover up any tattoos if possible.
• Wear minimal jewelry.
• A business suit is most appropriate. Men could also wear nice slacks with a jacket and tie. Women could wear a dress or skirt (below the knee) with a blouse.
• Make sure your shoes are polished.
• Women should not overdo it with makeup.

For what constitutes proper interview dress, check out Dressing for an Interview.

3. Study Your Resume

I have interviewed more than a dozen job candidates that couldn’t explain something they had on their own resume. “Gosh, that was a long time ago. I don’t remember,” is not an acceptable way to clarify something on a document that’s supposed to sell you. Read your resume and make sure you can accurately describe each and every bullet point on it.

Bonus: Visit the company’s website and spend 20 to 30 minutes surfing it. Learn about its products/services, the people that work there anything it does for the community. Also, look at the job listings – especially for the job that you’ll be interviewing for.

4. Practice Some Interview Questions

A recruiter in your field is the ideal person to give you a list of practice questions. While each interviewer has their own style, someone with experience in your field or with the company you’re interviewing with can also help. They know which common questions are asked, whether you’ll be quizzed about your knowledge or if you’ll be asked behavioral questions. Here are some generic questions that you might be asked:

• Why did you leave your last job?
• What are your strengths/weaknesses?
• What are your career goals?
• Tell me about your last job.
• Tell me about a project that you worked that was a success/failure.
• Tell me about how you handled a problem at work.
• What do you know about {skills on your resume}?

Also, look at our articles on interviewing for more ideas.

5. Visualize Success

Most people find interviews stressful and get nervous beforehand. That’s completely normal and many interviewers understand this. To help give you an edge, visualize yourself having a successful interview. Imagine yourself as you confidently walk into the interview room. Practice that walk. Practice introducing yourself to the interviewer. Use a firm grip (don’t crush the interviewer’s hand) and clearly state your name. “Hi Mr. Interviewer, I’m James Feudo and I’m excited to be here.” Smile.

If you take these five steps, you’ll find yourself ahead of the pack. I am shocked at how many people I’ve talked to who don’t prepare for an interview at all. It does show during the interview and in most cases, the interviewer won’t be impressed. So take a few hours, it could be enough to give you that edge to get the offer.

Reserve Your Spot:

With new social media services popping up every few months, you never know which ones will make it and which ones won’t. Most services require you to choose a username so it’s good practice, for branding purposes to sign up for any service just to reserve a name that you can consistently use across all services. If you wait too long, it’s possible that someone else may grab it.

If you’re not sure which ones to start with, here are the ones I recommend (with links to my pages):

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest

Focus on a Few:

Now just because you’ve signed up for several services, doesn’t mean you have to actively use them all. The most successful people on each service tend to focus primarily on that service. Yes, they’ve reserved their spot on the others and may even use them regularly, but their efforts are primarily focused on one or two.

Master One at a Time:

Each service has their own tricks and quirks. When you immerse yourself in a service and start engaging other users, you start to learn the ropes. In some cases, what you learn can be transferred to other services such as shorter and more informative posts get more attention.

When you start building your knowledge on a particular service, you do two things. First, you make connections which potentially can be converted to leads, but you also connect with on other services as you move on them. Second, you start building a reputation as you share your knowledge and expertise.

Help Others:

The best way to become successful on any social media service is to help others. This not only gives you a good reputation but it makes people want to help you. Most people that you’ll encounter are good people and if you do something for them, they’ll often reciprocate – often without being asked. So remember that you need to get out of that “me, me, me” mindset.

Many people make the mistake of jumping into social media and doing nothing but promote, promote, promote. I made this mistake at first and got nowhere. When I started trying to help others, I began making those friendships and connections that gave me a solid foundation to build off of. These are the people that will give you feedback, share your content and help you when you need it.

Learn from Your Mistakes:

You will most likely hit a few bumps along the road that will set you back, but don’t get frustrated. It’s okay as that’s how you learn. I’ve been teaching classes about social media since 2009 and a good chunk of my material comes from some of the mistakes I’ve made. So when you make a mistake, learn from the experience and don’t repeat it. The great thing about so many different services is that even if you completely fail on one (which is unlikely, at worst it’ll take you some time to figure it out) there are plenty others for you to master.

Hire Help:

Some people just aren’t a good match for using social media. In practically every class I teach, I have a person or two that I can tell is just going to get stressed out if they try to tackle social media alone. This doesn’t mean that they are bad people or aren’t smart, it’s just that you need to have a certain type of outlook when you begin using social media. I can spot these people right away as they have one or more of the following qualities:

• Reluctance to share information online.
• Easily frustrated with technology.
• Expecting big results right away.
• Concerned about the amount of time they need to invest to learn the ropes.

In these cases, I often recommend that they hire someone else to do the work for them if they have the budget to do so. I still stress that it’s important that they understand what’s going on because it’s easy to get ripped off. I have people that bring me proposals from other consultants all the time that just don’t make any sense.

I saved one gentleman over $1000 when I pointed out that there was no value in the services recommended by one consultant. They wanted to create a Facebook page for his t-shirt business and spend the money over four weeks for his business to get several thousand likes for him. When I asked him who would be adding content to the page to keep it fresh, it turned out he didn’t know. He told the consultant that he didn’t have the time to create the page updates but there was nothing in their proposal for adding content to this new page.

So at the very least, become knowledgeable on the basics of social media and what one can reasonably expect. If you’re concerned that you’re being ripped off or you just want someone you can run a proposal by, then you’re more than welcome to contact me.

I’ve explained how to use Twitter in another post, but one thing I’ve never gotten into to detail with is the mystery of why people unfollow other users. Twitter users tend to be more finicky and unstable than the other services due to two reasons. First, most Twitter users don’t really know how to use the service. Second, Twitter is the only major service where there are sites that rank your influence in the same manner Google ranks your web site’s authority. This complicates things because some users do what I call strategic following and unfollowing – which I’ll get to in a bit. But first, we’ll go over why you may have been unfollowed starting with the most obvious reason.

Someone didn’t like what you posted:

This is the most obvious reason. It should go without saying that if you post something that could offend a large group of people, you will lose a lot of followers. I made the mistake a few years ago posting on a hot button issue. Even though all I did was reply to others’ tweets, agreeing with what they posted, I still lost followers because they disagreed with me on the issue.

But again, Twitter users are finicky so you could post something about not liking your neighbors’ dogs barking and that might be enough to cause a crazy dog lady to unfollow you. Since Twitter is one of those services that doesn’t force you to use your real name and personal, many Twitter users hide behind an anonymous online profile which allows them to act strange. Some feel like a celebrity because they’ve amassed thousands of followers while others assume an alternate personal for their online profile. Rather than trying to understand their quirks, it’s best to just focus on the people that are more emotionally stable.

You tweet too frequently:

This is pretty common, especially among people who are new to Twitter or only follow a few people. The reasoning here is that if they see that tweets by you take up the majority of their Twitter feed, they may unfollow you. The recommended amount of tweets per day is 20 to 25, so it’s possible that your day’s worth of tweets may constitute over 50% of what they see. Rather than using an advanced feature such as lists, they may simply unfollow you so that they can see tweets from other Twitter users. In this case, I wouldn’t worry too much as these people will most likely provide little value to you.

Along these lines but something you do want to look out for is sending out a large amount of tweets in a short amount of time. The most common reason for this is perhaps you only log into Twitter once per day and the first thing you do is reply back to tweets that you were mentioned in. So in a fifteen minute span, perhaps you’ve sent out 30 responses. Some Twitter users may not like this and unfollow you. The good news is that you can fix this by scheduling your replies so they are spread out. There are a number of applications such as Hootsuite or TweetCaster that let you schedule your tweets.

You use Twitter as an instant messenger or chat service:

The point of Twitter is to share information and interact with other users. Some people make the mistake of having too many casual conversations in their public Twitter feed. This can annoy some Twitter users in the same manner as sending out too many replies. It’s okay to tell someone how you’re doing, but it’s a better practice to use direct messages (Twitter’s private messaging system) for lengthy conversations that only one other user might be interested in.

What you post is not interesting:

This is more common than you think and often a hard pill to swallow. Some people post too much information on Twitter such as that they’re getting ready for work in the morning, they had a long commute, the details of their day, their ride home, what they had for dinner, etc…. Others post nothing but movie quotes, song lyrics, or links to their latest blog articles.

The trick with Twitter is post interesting information to engage others by having them reply to your tweets or retweet what you posted to their followers. This is easier said than done as something that you post may interest one subset of followers but another set may not be interested. I ran into this where some people that followed me on Twitter were only interested in what I would post about public speaking while other people found public speaking boring and would only engage with my updates that were personal in nature such as when I’d share an observation or song I liked.
It can get frustrating, so the key here is to just remember that you can’t please everyone so don’t worry too much about it. Do your best to provide interest content and you’ll naturally attract an audience to engage.

You’ve been used:

There is a practice on Twitter that I absolutely detest. Some people will follow thousands of people in the hopes that they get followed back. Once they reach a certain threshold, they start unfollowing everyone. So they look like a celebrity because they have 50,000 people following them, but they only follow 168 people. I hate that practice so much that when someone does that to me, I block them.

The reason people do this is that there are a number of sites that rank your influence on Twitter. These rankings are used so that people can get paid to tweet. So if someone has 50,000 followers, they may make $30 to tweet a link for someone. If they do this 10 times a day, it’s $2100 per week (which translates to over $100,000 per year).

You don’t make the grade:

Not as bad as the blatant mass follow/unfollow but still frustrating are the people that are obsessed with rankings and use strategic following. What this means is that they only want to be followed by people who have high rankings as that increases their own rankings – Google works in a similar fashion for page rank.

So what these people do is use a tool that analyzes their followers and recommends people to unfollow. These could be people whose number of followers is less than the number of people they follow. It could also be people who only post links, never interact with other users or only post once per month.

In summary:

It’s easy to get obsessed with why you lose a follower or two on Twitter. My advice is to not worry about it unless you’re finding a trend that your numbers are dropping over time. These reasons that I’ve shared just show how fussy some Twitter users can be. I personally don’t unfollow people for any of these reasons – the only reason I unfollow people is if they unfollow me or don’t follow me back. Everyone has their own way that they use Twitter and with a few hundred million accounts out there, they are thousands of people to connect with that can make it a great experience for you.