Well, this was supposed to be my first post of the new year. As you’ve probably already realised, it didn’t end up that way. In fact, what with work and life and everything interfering, it’s turned out to be my second of the year, published nearly 3 months after I originally intended. It’s sorta sat in the drafts here taunting me as I failed repeatedly to finish it.
What better way to start off get into the year of social media than with a post about it? Not long ago, Some time ago, I wrote about how being important is one of the most important things in social media. With a bit of reflection, I’ve decided that the next most important thing about using social media (as marketers) is that one should, at all costs, avoid selling things.
I’ve always been…well…lets call it suspicious of the drive toward social media that we’ve been seeing over the last few years in the online marketing industry. It’s always been a vague and undefined sort of prejudice. And as much as I disliked it, I also felt a little unjustified about my stance toward it.
Afterall, its been booming for years already while I steadfastly avoided it as much as possible.
I would take a vicarious pleasure in articles like this one about GM pulling its Facebook advertising because I (not so) secretly didn’t want social advertising to work. (Obviously this says far more about me than it does about social media advertising, but I’ll refrain from speculating on my own shortcomings insofar as possible.) (In this post anyway.)
Social Marketing Matures
With the increased attention that social platforms are getting, there’s been a lot of very interesting discussion about social media marketing in recent months and in a certain sense, it’s changed my attitude towards the process, even as the attitudes of many others have started to undergo a shift in emphasis.
I can also identify exactly why my attitude has changed. And it’s because at last, people are talking about social media as a platform for marketing and not for sales.
This is a huge relief for me. Because as far as I’ve always been concerned, social media is not a sales platform. Nobody wants somebody yelling “buy my stuff” or “I’m amazing” in their ear when they’re consuming their social media, and that was always my biggest problem.
To me, the move toward social engagement, rather than social sales, has marked a growing maturity in the social media sphere.
Social Media Not Social Selling
These days of course, the focus in social is on engagement. And people have realised that engagement does not mean sales. (Not directly anyway.) Engagement means discussion. It means participation.
It means communication and collaboration between people with similar or complementary interests. Finally we are realising that the people online are not just potential clients, they are actually people. And as a result, we’re at last coming to understand that what people don’t want in a social setting is a sales pitch.
It is becoming necessary, along with being important, to avoid all appearance of selling anything at all. And that suits me just fine. Selling and social media have never gone together for me, and I always thought it was a failure in my understanding of the social concept.
Turns out that everybody else was just doing it wrong. (Yes, I know, it is possible for social media to drive sales. Even direct sales. But is that really how you want people to see you? The eternal salesperson pitching to the whole world in the hopes that some of it sticks? I didn’t think so.)
Social Strategy Planning
If you really want to get the most out of your social strategy, (and everybody wants that, especially with Google threatening to factor social engagement into the algorithm), then you need to approach it with a different mindset. You’re not out there to sell your product to people, you’re out there to get to know them, and get them to know you. And how do you do it? By engaging.
Already much has been written by smarter people than me about engagement. But in circles other than professional ones, it seems to have become one of those buzz words that people throw around because they’re current, or they sound good, or they think it’s what people want to hear.
At its core though, engagement is a very simple concept. It means talking to people. Getting involved in what they are saying, thinking, asking and so forth. It’s not a difficult concept. And as you can see, it doesn’t involve selling them anything or asking them to buy anything. Now, in the fullness of time, once they have gotten to know and trust you, an opportunity might arise where a particular question or problem or need is answered by your product or service.
Then, (and only then), may you mention that you have something that might help or that they might be interested in. But until and unless that eventuality arises, you can get the most out of social media by assiduously avoiding any appearance of selling anything.