You know what doesn’t work for a social media strategy? Not being social. It might sound like common sense, but all too often, being social is overlooked in a social media strategy. It’s not enough to just start accounts with all the most popular social media tools and community sites, even when you include professionally-designed graphics and a big bold display of your logo and a few text lines about your brilliant mission. First and foremost, you absolutely must BE SOCIAL!
When you are not being social, even if you think there is no message, you ARE sending a message to your consumers and potential consumers – and it is not a message you want to have associated with your brand. That message is… we don’t want to socialize. From the consumer perspective, your not being social looks like this:
- Not paying attention
- Not being interested
- Not caring
- Not engaging and interacting
Silence (not being social) is a lot quieter online than it is face-to-face. When you are silent online you are actually screaming… we don’t want to make the effort to build relationships or pay attention.
There is pressure these days to have a perfect social media strategy in place, and to have it in place NOW. A carefully thought-out, integrated strategy is very important, but even more important right NOW is to just start being social. Start now. Be social while you’re honing your strategy and building your ideal social media team so when you implement the rest of your strategy, your consumers will already be gathered around you.
Start the connections and start to build the relationships NOW…with the opposite of not being social:
- Be genuinely interested … and interesting
- Pay consistent attention to your consumers
- Ask questions, respond to answers, ask more questions, respond again (i.e. ENGAGE)
- “Talk” with your consumers, not at them
- Provide real, relevant value by interacting, listening, and socializing.
Don’t let your social media strategy falter. Get out there and get social… now!
Best advice: “Talk” with your consumers, not at them: This is key. Social Media is not about Broadcasting, but relationships. I see so many twitter profiles with tens of thousands of tweets and no favorites or retweets; many times very few friends. Who are they talking to? They are not making opportunities for relationships, and this is misuse of the beauty of social networks. Thanks, Ted. Subscribed.
I am so glad the post spoke to you Rodney.
Absolutely spot on Ted:) I started doing this at the begining of Jan this year and being social got me inundated with profitable offers instead of the waste of time most think being social is. I just got back to it again last week (been too busy offline:) and again the instant connections I’ve been making far outweigh any other strategies I’ve used marketing online.
Funny thing is social media seems new but it really isn’t, back in the 90s there were forums etc that served as social media to a large extent. Again it was being social in those days that brought me success in marketing via those mediums.
This is great advice, sadly most will just ignore it and keep being silent, too busy or even worse too important to be social.
Exactly, Kunle, it’s the platforms that are new, being social has been around for centuries. The platforms now make it scaleable, affordable at scale, and easier to reach many at once and have them participate n building a relationship with you while observing you doing it with others.