Are you listening?
By now, you probably have considered using Facebook and/or Twitter for your marketing, at least once. Hopefully, you also thought: “I should really be updating my blog more often.”
Yes. And yes. Those are good realizations. There are plenty of good reasons to start and maintaining social media outlets for your business, be it a blog, Twitter, or a Facebook page (along with others, like Flickr, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Tumblr/Posterous, etc., etc…).
But, while thinking about our marketing, we tend to forget: who are we talking to? Don’t THEY have something to say, too? After all, “social” of social media refers to both-way communications/participation that happens within them.
Encouraging, tracking, measuring and maintaining healthy channels of interaction between your business and its constituencies is a fine art (and pretty new one at that); there’s a lot of trial-and-error going on out there*.
Whatever you do to plan for your “social media strategy”—and it doesn’t have to be a fancy, turn-everything-into-quantifiable-metrics kind of plan—, it bears to stress this: social media are listening posts, more than soapboxes for you to stand on.
Last week, I attended a introductory demonstration of SAS’s new service called Social Media Analytics (SASSMA—I wish they came up with a better name, but hey, these are some super-brainy, uber-techies, who tend to hate “marketing” anything*).
While I think the product itself is a bit of an overkill for us small businesses (“brand sentiment forecasting,” anyone?), I think the concept is very timely and relevant to everyone. And the reasons why SAS would develop such a product, and the fact so many people are paying attention, contains an important lesson.
And you guessed it: Social media is important, not as a marketing channel, but as a communication channel.
TV, radio and print media have been largely marketing channels. Phones, emails, ham radio? Communication.
So, treat your twitter account and facebook page as phone lines, or email boxes.
What does that mean, in practical terms?
Try this for a week: Focus on what your people (the followers, fans—I guess they are “likers” now—) are saying, instead of what you are going to say.
Are you following the right people? Are the right people following you? Who are they following/liking? There might be some tweaking needed there (don’t be afraid to “unfollow” people! It’s okay.)
Maybe you can interact with them a little. Scary, yes. A little weird, certainly. But you will find that people are a lot nicer when you reach out to them. Much like in real life.
Who knows, you might make some friends.
*There’s a great article written by Rob Laughter, a young web marketing nerd, which outlines practical steps on how to use twitter. It also helped me hone my thinking of this very piece. Cheers, Rob!
**I’m just poking fun here. Obviously, these people know marketing, judging from how the launch event for this app. went down.
