3 Awesome Steps For Making Social Media An Investment (Not An Expense)
How many social media articles do you read per day? Five? Ten? More than twenty? How many of them tell you something you don’t know? How many promise the tips to help you achieve success only to offer a list you’ve read 10 times that day alone?
Being a Social Media Manager means I’m constantly mining for insights, tips and hacks for anything that goes beyond the obvious “Step 1: be real!”
Approximately 99% of the time, I’m disappointed with what I find. Why? Because everyone is focused on the journey without telling you what to do once you get there.
I’m referring to the “journey to success” which could mean anything to any given company. It could be having your company acquired by Google, surpassing 100 likes on Facebook or getting a Twitter shoutout from Gary Vaynerchuk.
Success is relative, and while there are endless “tips” to help you reach varying levels of success, I have yet to find help for maintaining and/or growing after having achieved a given level of success.
So I decided to define them myself.
1. Differentiate Brand Maintenance from Social Impact Marketing
As an incoming social media manager, the generally accepted first move is to perform a social media audit: see which platforms have a presence, how each of those accounts are faring, check for uniform branding across the board, and the like. That’s great, but before you even begin your audit, you should be asking yourself one question:
Is social media an expense or an investment?
I was asked this by the CEO of a client when I was working social media at a PR firm and it has resonated with me ever since. Does your company approach social media “because everyone else is there,” or as a tool for growth and expanding your marketing efforts? Once you decide one way or the other you’re ready to move forward.
Maintenance of social media accounts is easy. Okay, maybe it’s a bit difficult, but it’s certainly not beyond your scope. You curate content, whether your own or industry news from around the web, and you post it. Daily or weekly or monthly — whatever works for you. Congrats, you now have maintained social media networks and can write off the expense at month’s end.
What about making an impact? Really investing in your social media efforts to not only stamp your company’s name in the internet’s history, but to actually make an impact on the world.
By the way, “making an impact” isn’t reserved for the non-profit companies around the world. It means inspiring a tribe of users who create 24-minute tutorials of your platform because they just love it so much.
Invest in your tribe by engaging with them, making them feel valued and you instantly create an ROI that previously seemed like it was an impossible ask. When you make the switch from just posting on social for the sake of being there and start putting in the time and effort to make your social something spectacular, your users (and the internet) will respond in kind.
2. Make a Real Impact With Social
It’s simple: engage, engage, engage. Now, what does that actually mean?
Ask questions. Post exciting updates about what goes on in your office. Come up with giveaways (and follow through with them). In short, be fun, exciting, real, and engaging.
Your social followers, or internet users in general, aren’t dumb. They understand the concept of transparency, and can see straight through your fake posts that are trying to engage them with your brand. They don’t want tortured sentences trying to put the cool into corporate. They want a connection.
They want to meet you face to face. They want shout-outs on Instagram. They want to feel like they’re part of your company.
When someone comments on your post don’t just like it — comment back. Reach out to users who have published created works about your brand and tell them how awesome they are. Give them real feedback. Trust me, they’ll appreciate it.
Truthfully, it’s not that difficult to make an impact with your users on social media. Just follow the rule of thirds (1/3 engaging posts, 1/3 company updates, and 1/3 industry news). Or come up with exciting and fresh ways to share your content and interact with your users on a daily basis, such as Twitter chats, Reddit AMA’s or “User Superhero Wednesday” (for example).
With the way social network algorithms work in conjunction with general user behavior patterns, you should be seeing major upticks in your analytics right away. Don’t believe me? Try it and prove me wrong.
3. Invest In Your Social Media Following
Fun fact: the word invest can mean two different things and both of them matter when it comes to social media.
To put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.
Pay for ads. Get kickass graphic designers. Invest in video and audio equipment for amazing videos. (Or use a tool with an awesome library of visual and audio assets.)
All of this works, and is important to give your audience the content they deserve. They don’t follow you for the heck of it, they really want to hear from you. So why would you reward that loyalty with cheap imagery and spotty content?
To use, give, or devote (time, talent, etc.), as for a purpose or to achieve something.
By now you’ve understood that social media management takes time, but how much time/money/effort are you devoting to truly achieve something? Are you investing in your tribe of users the way you invest in your employees? Your friends? Your family?
All those other people are kinda forced to listen to you; Your followers choose to. You owe them at least some form of real devoted investment.
Conclusion
I’d like to think that the above tips are ideas that came off the top of my head, but they’ve been sculpted, adapted and realized through years of social media management experience. Handling different clients, both B2B and B2C, at startups and major corporations and, of course, reading countless marketing and social media articles every day.
These tips might not seem truly groundbreaking, but they’re a roadmap to success on social once you’ve switched your mindset toward investing in your marketing, in your company, and in your users.
Once you’ve adopted the investment mindset, you will begin to see responses that could be defined as success. Like the Twitter shoutouts and the user-made platform tutorials.
If social media is just something you need to have, like your janitorial staff or a company insurance plan, you will never see what social media can really do for your brand and your relationship with your customers.
The success you reap by investing in social really lies in the fact that you can build a personal bond with customers that is thoughtful and ultimately more engaging and effective at promoting your brand. And that’s the success that really matters.
Need ideas for keeping your content fresh on social media? Watch this!
