Do social media the right way. By not DOING social media.
I’ve had a few conversations lately about how to DO social media. One of them was with an “expert” in the field who told me that it’s all about numbers. I have to get my like count as high as I can. I have to get as many followers as I can. I was shown examples of campaigns that had high amounts of both.
To be frank, I’m surprised that this is still a strategy that people employ. When I looked over the examples of “successful” social media campaigns, I couldn’t help but notice something that I see pretty often. There was no interaction on the Facebook page and were very very few tweets on the Twitter timeline that I was looking at. At least, not from the fans and followers.
Like a lot of these social media campaigners, I noticed that this “expert” was doing it all very very wrong.
I figured I would sit down and write this post up to present an example of a social media campaigner that is doing it correctly. Before I continue, I do want to let you know that the person behind it is my wife. I want to add though, that I’ve only given 2 pieces of advice on how to handle the social media side and she has taken that advice and run with it.
So, the site is – ThingsToDoForKids.com. It’s still a relatively new site ~ 90 days old. She does this in her spare time and hasn’t done any kind of marketing or campaigning. All of her visits are word of mouth.
These are some stats at the time of this writing.
The site has 112 likes. The Facebook page has 141 likes. The Twitter follower count is 18.
None of that seems like much, I know. The reason I’m writing this post though is to talk about the way social media is being used in this case.
The advice that I gave in the beginning was “to share” and “to communicate”. Those are surprisingly the two pieces that I see a lot of people leave out of social media. Myself included sometimes.
If you look at the wall here - http://www.facebook.com/ThingsToDoForKids , you’ll notice that 99% of the posts are sharing somebody else’s information. Paying attention to the other people out there who are trying to make this whole thing work. If there are comments on any of the posts, then there are replies to those comments. There are conversations happening.
If you look at the Twitter account – http://twitter.com/#!/ttd4kids, she is only following 40 people and has only 18 followers. Some people would suggest following 100′s or 1000′s more to try to expand her reach but I would say, keep it as is. In fact, I might suggest that she unfollow a few people. Why? Because she is actually using Twitter. The people that she’s following are the people whose information she is sharing. She follows these people to find things to do so that she can share with the people who are actively using her site and information.
Can you imagine trying to read the timeline of 3,000 people? That would take up most of your day. If you aren’t actively following people on Twitter, why keep them in your timeline?
To sum all this up, I would rather see social media campaigns with 10 people who are actively involved than see campaigns that have 10,000 people who signed up for a special offer and never came back.
Numbers only count when it comes to interaction.
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If you look at the Twitter account – http://twitter.com/#!/ttd4kids, she is only following 40 people and has only 18 followers. Some people would suggest following 100′s or 1000′s more to try to expand her reach but I would say, keep it as is. In fact, I might suggest that she unfollow a few people. Why? Because she is actually using Twitter. The people that she’s following are the people whose information she is sharing. She follows these people to find things to do so that she can share with the people who are actively using her site and information.
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