You have the accounts, you have the followers, so what’s next?

There are a bunch of factors that go into a social media plan of attack — including the value of an approach that grows. Building the roots is important, but keeping them healthy, especially when there are many of them, is key. One idea for that — and more — in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Scaling your social attack: Having trouble growing your social media presence across your platform? Consider treating your organization’s social team like a hub with a number of spokes, according to SocialFish’s Maddie Grant, who’s bouncing off a Jeremiah Owyang presentation. “This is the model that we help most of our clients set up – a social media service center that sits in the middle and serves every other department,” she says. “The service center (a.k.a. social media team) sets policy, provides training, selects technology vendors (or requirements for such), researches new tools and sites, sets metrics for measuring success based on organizational goals. In exchange, the business units or departments agree to manage their own social media efforts, report their progress, and share best practices with other departments.” How is your social scale looking?

Don’t hide your identity: Think you can keep your personal social persona separate from your professional one? Good luck with that, says nonprofit speaker Rosetta Thurman. She warns against acting fake in a business context: “Sure, you don’t want to be spilling the details of every single aspect of your life,” she explains. “But you also don’t want to be portraying yourself to be someone you’re not. Because presenting yourself on social networks is not about trying to be this perfect, professional, always PC person.” Would you prefer a more open persona or one that’s more private?

LinkedIn’s new profiles: If you’re a LinkedIn fan, expect to see some changes to your profile coming soon. VentureBeat reports that the changes, first mentioned about a couple of months ago, will start rolling out to user profiles today. “There’s really only a handful of companies that can connect … billions of people,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said at a press event regarding the updates this morning. The company calls it the largest change it has made to the platform since its launch — and corresponds with the company’s uber-snazzy mobile apps, which are arguably better than Facebook’s or Twitter’s.

When social media goes “dark”: In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen a couple of pieces taking the idea of social media down a peg — especially as far as its traffic-driver role. The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal started the trend, creating this theory of “Dark Social,” suggesting that Facebook and Twitter are only part of the story. “If you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is ‘optimizing for social,’ you’re only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself,” he argued. “There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut.” Now Forbes contributor Haydn Shaughnessy raises a different issue — one undercutting the theories of sentiment analysis — in his latest blog post.

Are you looking beyond Facebook and Twitter when you think of “social media”? Let us know what social means for you in the comments.

(TMG archive photo)