What is Social Media and how can you strategically use Social Media to advance your brand, monetise your efforts or simply sell more products?
Lets look at the most common approach I notice on Social Media feeds. Social Media is seen as a free platform, therefore the most junior person is assigned to the task to raise what is called social media awareness about the brand and measurement is purely around numbers, likes and that is often called engagement. Now stop for a moment and think, are numbers and likes engagement, or is that simply winking in the dark?
Let’s not fool ourselves here, if we want attention we need to give people attention – life is after all all about relationships. Attention can be direct attention or in the form of giving people what they need. (don’t give your product or service away, it has no value unless they want and need it. Giving it away will then only devalue your product or service and people will wonder what the actual value is) So the question is what do people need? It is called a human experience and you can give them a human experience by being real – thinking what the experience for the person should be rather than what we need to tell them.
Remember one of the most important lessons in marketing …
People do not want to hear from you, unless they have heard of you.
So how did they hear about you, was it because you told a story that they could relate to or did you try so hard to impress them that you actually missed the person in the big show you were trying to create. Gary Vaynerchuk @GaryVee on Twitter says that you should only document and never create. What exactly does he mean by this?
Tell people stories as they happen, yes immediately and don’t try and make the story different from what it actually is, tell the story from your perspective and keep telling the story and as many different stories as you can. Everyday there are numerous activities happening around us: What were our thoughts at the beginning of our day, could you share these thoughts with your audience? What did you hear that was different, can you make an interesting comment about your experience? What did we notice that is interesting on our way to work, what may be important to you is more than likely important to your audience – share these thoughts. The more you share of yourself the more interesting you become and then people will talk about you, not because you that fascinating but simple because you chose to share a little of yourself and made the experience real for someone else.
We can think what we used to do will work, but I can tell you what we did yesterday has just become heavy baggage. So lets all start thinking about how we can give people a human experience without worrying how we going to create stuff, man has in reality never created anything but a mess. Lets just be a little more real and we will become passionate about the world around us.
Photo credit: eltpics via Foter.com / CC BY-NC
