Social Media: How to make it work

3 March, 2010

• commitment
• customers
• engage
• quality vs quantity
• social media

Michelle Jennins

Category: Social Media

You've heard about the potential success of engaging in social media to create brand hype, solidify B2B relationships and spread the word of your business to customers and fans.

But how do you make it work?

Here is a quick summary of a number of pitfalls that will rapidly bring the success of your strategy to a halt.

Belief = Commitment

The first hindrance to the success of your social media campaign is not believing it will work. Sound a bit generic and airy fairy? The point here is that if you believe in something, then you will allow yourself the time, effort and budget for a decent commitment - like they say, it won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

Engage, Don't Talk

The reason why your customers love social media so much is because they feel they are part of what you are doing, and have a say in what they want. It's not because you lecture them on how wonderful you are, or because you won that industry/company/employee award for the nth time in a row.

Listen and respond, introduce and follow - let your customers guide you as to where your conversations, topics and competitions should go.

Quality vs Quantity

We all have the friend (or friends) on Facebook that have a ridiculous number of 'friends' that it is obvious this person hasn't had the chance to have met, let alone be a friend to, all those numbers. It's a popularity contest.

Don't get me wrong, reaching a certain number of fans or followers is a great milestone, and one way of measuring success of your social media campaigns. However, it is more important to assess the quality of your engagement with your customers, and how much of a real bond exists between your business and them.

Being subjective, this is a much less quantifiable indicator, and it can be easy to focus entirely on numbers rather than the whole purpose of social media - to connect and engage with people.

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