The effectiveness of mass media in marketing has been shown time and time again with iconic ads from companies like Guinness and Coca-Cola. As mass media has developed new mediums for communication have been created and with them different ways of communicating to your customers. Social media is no exception to this trend and with its creation we’ve been given an amazing tool to communicate and interact with people. Social media has the ability to be one of the most powerful marketing tools but it’s often poorly utilized. Many marketing professionals use these tools forgetting one thing: there has to be dialogue in social media.
Many businesses today use social media excessively and improperly because they’re often forgetting about one thing; social media is just that, social. The power of this form of communication is its social nature, it allows a business and it’s current or prospective clients to have two-way communication like they never could before. More often than not businesses will do one of two things wrong when posting on social media either they send as much information as possible or they only send information about their business.
One of the most common mistakes with social media is simply filling up users news feeds with endless amounts of information and never facilitating a conversation with it. By losing the social aspect of your posts and tweets you simply become another advertisement that everyone will skip over. The goal of social media should be to engage your followers by curating information they’re interested in but simply curating that information isn’t enough. Once you’ve started curating and posting information you should begin interacting with your users. Discuss the changes and trends, speculate on what the future will hold, whatever it takes to engage your followers in a conversation.
The second issue most businesses have is simply sending information about themselves, they slowly become the egotistical kid on the playground who no one wants to play with. This slowly isolates the company from viewers on the social media because they’re not interested in getting bombarded with advertisements and instead want information that relates to them.
To correctly use social media your business needs to find the middle ground and facilitate a conversation through relevant news and updates to your market. Effective social media usage will differ between the networks however you should post more material of interest to your followers than personal marketing material. The goal of most of your material should be to spark conversation with your followers and interact with them through responses, pictures, and videos. By implementing conversation into your platform you will how important dialogue in social media really is.
Given its power there’s no reason your company shouldn’t be on social media but if it is it’s important to remember exactly what you should be doing. If your company is ever going to be successful with social media they need to interact with customers. What this means is that it’s time to quit flooding your news feeds with useless information and help curate things your followers want to see and then discuss those things with them. By interacting you’re more likely to create a positive brand image and attract more customers than you previously had.