Marketers loved talking about social media marketing and what it can do for business growth. Social media marketing tools fast became widely used and building a social media presence is now part of every company’s communications plan.
What is interesting is that although social media marketing is embraced by so many businesses around the World, only a few small business owners actually know how to use social media to drive sales or at least promote their name and message within their target market. Some small business owners are asking even to this day one of the oldest social media related questions: what should we tweet about?
Somehow this isn’t a surprise. Small business owners always struggled to make ends meet and when the articles about how social media marketing will help them tap new revenue streams started to surface, they rushed in. The problem is that they started using social media to make money, without using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest because they were genuinely interested in them. Today, managing their company’s social media accounts is a time-sucking task that brings little to no reward.
What small business owners didn’t understand about social media is something important – HOW IT WORKS. When Joe from Sydney posts on Facebook a picture of his dog it’s to let the World know that he still exists. It’s just noise, but the type of noise other users enjoy. The same is true when Linda from New York posts a new Mark Twain quote on her Tumblr blog. The post lets others know that Linda is still alive, well and kicking. Real people don’t post on Twitter or Facebook thinking that they must deliver their entire outlook on life in a single tweet or post. A single tweet doesn’t need to tell the World what they are all about. That is where business owners got it wrong. Every tweet was treated as a sales pitch, every Facebook post became a short intro to the company’s culture deck.
Just because a business owner spends more time drafting a Facebook post than the average user, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be an interesting post. The secret is to consume good and relevant content. The content we consume online is the one we transform into new content when we’re publishing a new tweet or post or pin. We inhale the content created by consumers or brands and we exhale new content, the one create by our company. By consuming interesting content, we become more interesting and our own content becomes more attractive.
Automation in social media replaces the act of consuming content and transforming it into something more interesting. The automation tool just takes in links and mindlessly spits them out. With less and less people actively involved in social media, channels will just broadcast content. Twitter will become a TV-like environment with too many channels and nothing to watch. That’s why automation won’t solve a company’s social media issues.
To make people care about your company you need to be present and understand where they’re coming from, consume the content they produce and create your own.
