5 Things I’ve Learnt from Researching Social Media
It’s obvious that many Gen Y-ers have been blessed (or cursed?) with the Midas touch of Tweeting, liking, tagging, friending, unfriending and all the other nonsense verbs that have been birthed from the loins of social media giants Facebook and Twitter. It’s a fantastic skill, one that can be harnessed to turn heads for businesses seeking new leads, generating interest in a brand, or simply just telling people you exist.
But of all the hundreds of articles written about how to use social media to your advantage, or lists of all the amazing things it can do for you and your brand, there are a few things that don’t translate so well.
What follows is my list of things to remember to save your marketing campaign from social media suicide.
1. How to Walk the Fine Line
I like to think of this first point as a cross between the proverbs of walking a tightrope and drawing a fine line. A fine line, that is, between yourself and failure. It’s to do with that delicate balance between natural and organic writing and the firmness of professionalism. No guide on social media success will ever be able to explain how to perfectly capture “That Tone”. You know the one. That effortless spitting out of information in a way that is funny, positive and absolutely appropriate to your individual workplace and audience.
You can’t Google ‘how to write social media naturally’ because it doesn’t exist. All writing for social media is contrived and awkward; there are just degrees of awkwardness, which I believe can be overcome with time and skill. If you think about it, it’s really a very hard genre of writing to master. Firstly, it’s relatively new. So ‘manuals of style’ don’t exist. Or if they do, they’re written online by other amateurs. Secondly, it’s sort of weird. You’re often writing on behalf of your company, an entity made up of more than one person, in a context where it’s necessary to be gender, race and age appropriate at all times. Thirdly, it’s wildly intimidating. What you write may be viewed by anyone, all over the world, for an indefinitely long amount of time.
How then, do you ‘walk the fine line’? It boils down to practice, and a kind of embracing of that wild abandon it takes to write online, on behalf of others, whilst breaking those rules that don’t even really exist.
2. When It’s Wrong To Sell Your Body (And When It’s OK)
How many times, in updating various social media, have you plugged your brand and your business? The answer is probably many, many times. After all, we’ve been told over and over that social media is THE future, THE place to generate sales and if you don’t start using it RIGHT NOW your whole entire business is going to wither away into nothingness. What if they’re wrong? Hypothetically, what if an announcement was made that the internet was going to be TURNED OFF tomorrow? Would your business survive without it? I believe the answer should be yes. It’s not realistic to imagine every single lead is going to come from a great social media plan. However, it certainly makes a difference.
My point is that people are going to subconsciously ignore you if every single Tweet or Facebook post is advertising. It’s important, again, to walk the fine line and have a nice balance between generating interest in what you do, but more importantly WHY you do it and WHO is doing it. (See point 5).
3. How Not To Be An Accidental Creep
This is a hard one to describe but it concerns that ‘stalker-creepiness’ factor that comes automatically from social networking. It’s when you ‘add’ or follow a client, and find out some cringe-worthy detail from a tagged photo, or see an update about their Friday night you somehow don’t think was meant for your eyes. Worse still, you pick up a bit of sensitive information about their lives, and it accidentally pops out at the next meeting that their recent divorce had turned nasty.
The problem here is that people (mostly) are stupid and will share a LOT about their lives online without adjusting privacy settings, thinking about who they add as Facebook friends or thinking at all. The only advice I have here is to be very careful about who you are connected with on your social media networks, and try your best not to ‘remember’ personal info (no matter how saucy it is).
4. I’m A Real Boy!
While this one is closely related to tone and selling yourself and your brand, I wanted to emphasize how creativity and personality are underrated in writing for social media. I’m not sure if this is an obvious one or not, and it sometimes relates to your context, but in general, people enjoy reading things that sound like there is someone actually talking. It’s easy to fall into robotic, cold language that is safe from slippage, but where’s the fun in that?
It’s ok to let loose in the world of social media because the standard rules of communication are lax: it’s (fairly) anonymous. Again, this does not mean you can’t express yourself like a human! People don’t usually read jargon or tech-speak on their own free will, so don’t make your posts sound like they were written by your computer.
5. The F-Word
F is for fun! Fun fun fun. See, it’s easy to have fun. And even if your target audience is super-serious, suited-up suckers, I’m sure secretly they’ll enjoy seeing the more jovial side of you and your team. Give your audience an insider’s view on what you’re workplace is like- show them pictures of people’s kooky desks or staff Christmas parties (from early on in the night). Relax when posting and remember the joys of privacy settings- allow only specific viewers if you want to post something that only you and your colleagues or close clients would find funny.
This leads me into a final word about balancing social media marketing with a bit of insight into who you are or why you do what you do. It’s the philosophy behind your service or product that’s going to generate interest in your business, not the service or product itself. And at the end of the day, that’s what people are going to enjoy reading. Tweet away!
