Why your social media needs a personality

As most people know by now, social media is a great platform for any sized business that is willing to put in the time and creativity required to keep your fans and customers engaged. Anyone that thinks all they have to do is create a Facebook or Twitter account and people will automatically pay attention either works for Red Bull or has no idea what they are talking about.  

A modified version of the old website adage that "Content is king" applies to social media. You have to constantly be finding RELEVANT content to share with your community. Not just mass quantities of information poured out minute-after-minute via Twitter. That will just overblitz your followers and make them pay less attention to you. One or two really good, relevant posts per day is all it takes. 

One reason why social media is so effective for small businesses is that it allows customers the chance to interact with the brand on a personal basis. The person updating the account is typically the owner and they know their business inside and out. Typically they don't use corporate-speak when talking to customers, they are free to use a sarcastic tone or a cringe worthy dark joke here and there, which the masses appreciate.

That is probably one of the toughest selling points for getting large corporations to use social media. If you put tough restrictions on those that will be updating the account, you will not get a return. But, if you allow your social media people to use their personalities within reason, like Samsung Canada did in this amazing bit of PR work, then you will find success and quite often will get noticed by the community.

So if your social media isn't firing on all cylinders maybe it's time to add a bit more personality into the mix.

Are you being a twit?

Are you making the most of your Twitter account?

You may be working hard to come up with clever or relevant tweets for your target market or unique offers to send to your followers, but if you haven't put the time into acquiring and cultivating the right followers then you are just wasting your time.

If you are a B2B company and think that following medium-to-large sized businesses twitter accounts is getting you any value, then you should rethink that idea. These accounts are maintained by the communications/marketing/pr department of a company, so unless you are selling advertising or other products related to these specialties then you aren't hitting the decision maker for your product. The people you need to try and get following you are the decision makers in those companies. But how do you find those people?

• Collect business cards from networking and business meetings then check to see if these contacts are on Twitter
• Go through the Followers of the company's corporate Twitter account, the people managing the account will often like to follow members of the company
• Use other social media profile information (ie. Facebook, LinkedIn) to see if contacts have listed a Twitter account

Just following these people won't guarantee they follow you back, but it is a good way to let them know you are on Twitter and introduce yourself to them. When one of these people gets an email notifying them "John Smith is now following you!" the reaction will often be to find out who this new follower is.

Now all you have to do is keep them interested in what you have to say.