As any social media marketer will tell you, unless you’re a reality TV star, the ‘Me! Me! Me!’ approach seldom works when promoting a business. Would you return to visit a twitter timeline saturated with the same promotional tweets? Probably not.

The ideal recipe for content, according to Peg Fitzpatrick, is for the material you share on social media to be ‘85 percent other people’s materials and 15 percent yourself.’ This means retweeting, sharing content by others, or even involving other people in the conversation. With twitter, you can use a web browser extension tool such as Riffle, to easily find out how your twitter is weighted, and adjust your behaviour.

Kim Garst has predicted that humanized businesses will be key to driving more sales in 2015. Social media, is, as its name suggests, all about building a community and having a relationship with other users. As well as involving others, make your social media presence more personal. Don’t be afraid to inject some of yourself in your social media, show the day-to-day of running your business, place yourself in the world, and therefore in the hearts of the consumers.

In other words:

· Be generous: follow, like, retweet, share other people’s posts.

· Create a feed that people will want to visit because of the excellent content that you’re sharing

· Don’t just drily share links to buy, show us the human side of your business.