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Roderick Low is a social media coach and trainer at Expeditus Media. He helps small and medium businesses make sense of the social web and equip them with the skills, tools and strategies necessary to reach out and connect to their target audience.
Most of the time when I interact with small business owners who are interested in social media marketing, they would want to know the specific steps to success.
Well, as much as I would like to say that success is all about knowing the best practices, it is not the case. No doubt steps are important, but steps are just part of a larger picture.
Besides knowing the right actions to take, success also results from having and fulfilling a clear purpose of being on the social web.
Make building a connection the primary purpose
If your organization’s social media efforts have no clear purpose yet, then I suggest you make building connections the primary purpose.
Once you focus on that, you would be more interested in the people you want to make a difference to, rather than the specific steps in doing it.
Facebook flourished not because it has the best features around the web (even if it does) but because it understands the fundamental principle of being human, that is, to thrive in a community.
3 ways to build great connections
So how do you start building connections? How do you start telling people that you are truly interested in helping them solve their problems? Here are 3 ways to help you get the ball rolling.
1. Gathering Feedback
Social media has evolved to a stage where feedback can determine the lifespan of a product. Companies began to realize that it is no longer possible to ignore what their customers are saying about their brand on the social web. So instead of ignoring those negative feedback, why not have a platform to gather them?
Starbucks and Dell are great examples. They have platforms where users can suggest and vote for changes to their products or services. Both are willing to listen to their customers and as a result, Starbucks is ranked the most engaging brand while Dell reportedly made $6.5 million through Twitter alone.
Companies should start coming up with ways to get feedback from the folks who are most important to them. They should start listening to the groundwell and respond if necessary. From a PR standpoint, the very least you can do, is to show that you care.
2. Provide valuable information
This advice is especially directed to the Facebook fan page administrators. I usually turn down Facebook fan page invitations because most of them don’t provide value.
They merely blast promotions after you joined them, but Facebook doesn’t work that way.
The questions I have in mind when deciding whether to accept invitations are “why should I join this page? What benefit does it bring me?”
You see, you need to communicate to users the benefit of joining your community. On social media, you can benefit communities by providing valuable information. Create How-Tos, whitepaper (effective for b2b), or a list of resources that are useful to users.
However, without establishing a connection with your target audience, how would you know which of their problems you can solve? How would you know what kind of content attracts them? You can’t do that unless you make an effort to know them personally.
3. Ask them out
Offline events have become increasingly popular since the rise of social media. Users can now meet each other offline, and even those who are unable to attend can be involved in the event by reading and responding to tweets.
Social media savvy companies now have a chance to not only engage their customers in person, but also amplify the engagement though social technologies.
Create events that are relevant to your business and customers. I wrote a book about Botak Jones and how it engaged its 5000 Facebook fans with ‘Free Lunch’, an event aimed at building connections and gathering feedback from the community.
I believe more of such events should happen on a regular basis to reward fans for their loyalty and to build closer, deeper connections.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, step-by-step guide will only get you this far. We now know that connection is what really brings your social media endeavor to a higher level. Agree?
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Tags: Business, Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter
