Let Me Help You Help Me Help Yourself

Now that you have a good solid foot in the door to social media marketing, it's time to broaden your user base. How to do this? Get the attention of influencers relevant to your industry and get them talking! Like I said in my previous post, it's not all about you. A large chunk of what you put out there on social should be from your customers, and hopefully influential ones. Once you get their attention, you can move on to advocacy, which is a gold mine. In the end, you are helping them and they are helping you help them. Sounds confusing, I know. But it works.

You're a Jerk (I Know)

It sounds like common sense, but just like deodorant, people who need it the most tend to never use it. So, let me just go out and say it: if you want your business to succeed and want to enhance your social media presence, don't be a jerk. The key to a meaningful social strategy is to be genuine with your posts and your interactions. After all, social media is just that: social. By definition, "social" is characterized by "friendly companionship or relations." Interactions among social beings. Engagement between multiple parties participating. We are inherently social. Why can't our Twitters, Facebooks, Instagrams, etc be too?

This isn't the time to pelt your consumers with an overly branded compilation of stuff like they are some kind of human dart board. Companies doing it right have found that being genuine and talking about what the consumers want to talk about drives engagement and results in better conversation.

If you just realized that you are in fact being a slimy jerk with your social media efforts, that's okay. The first step to recovery is acknowledging that you actually have a problem. Here are several steps to save you from the depths of social media suicide and bring you into the light.

1. Give and take. It is a delicate balance between the two. Finding a happy medium is vital.
2. Find a personality. Having a personality to your social media presence will make it easier to turn a non human technology into a human one.
3. Connect and care. You can't always be the center of attention. Make a connection and build off of that. People love to talk about themselves.

Stop, Look, and Listen

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side, but first he had to stop, look, and listen.

Stop. Look. Listen.

Those words have been engrained into my mind better than any Taylor Swift song that the radio insists on playing at the top of every hour of every day. My parents taught me them so I wouldn't die while crossing the street. And guess what. IT WORKED. Because I was able to put those words into use while making the treacherous journey across 4 lanes of overly caffeinated suburban women in SUVs, I survived. And I thrived. Imagine if social media marketers could do the same.

I cannot stress how important it is for marketers to learn to shut their mouths (or rather, their fingers) and listen to their audience. Users are more than ready to share what they are really thinking on social media, and when they do, that's where the real beauty lies. Listening for what the consumer wants encourages a two way communication that will lead to loyalty, engagement and perhaps even advocacy. Sometimes, the most beneficial thing a social media marketer can do is to stop, look and listen.

So, why did the social media marketer cross the road?