Why is social media so difficult for businesses and brands to crack when thirteen-year-old girls and feckless stoners are able to gather millions of followers without even trying? As Keith Middlebrook says, social media is a popularity contest, and people who run marketing firms are rarely popular people. The sort of strategic and analytic thinking that wins in the marketing world is not what wins people over on social media.
Drive for Appeal and Forget Control
You need some sort of control over your audience if you wish to push them down a sales funnel. Be it directing their attention or be it convincing them to take a simple inquiring action. Things are different on social media. There is a reason why people watch videos of glitches in games, or bloopers in movies, or snake bite videos. They have an appeal. In those cases, the appeal is of something different.
Forget trying to control, what you can offer that serves to appeal to people. You will be surprised what appeals to people. For example, mastering Instagram is hard, and yet where we all know how sexy models and funny memes are a roaring success, did you also know that engineering videos are very popular, as are many varieties of arts, crafts, and cooking. People want to peek behind the curtains of those who create. Can you offer something similar?
Keith Middlebrook Says to Avoid Fan Blaming
Fan blaming is something that was created by Hollywood. They create something terrible, fans react badly, so producers call them entitled manbabies or toxic fans. This is nothing new, it is just done on a larger scale by movie producers. Customer/fan blaming is common among businesses, and it is very damaging when you do it on social media. Even if the customer left a bad review because of damage they caused themselves to your product, you shouldn’t assign blame (nor should you apologize). Instead, take the approach of a problem fixer. You want to help and you want to fix the problem. This will always go over better than outright pointing out that the customer probably shouldn’t have tried to teach your singing wall fish how to swim in a pond.
Set Very Definite Staff Policies
Some companies are now refusing to hire what are known as social justice warriors because they are damaging to online reputations. With that in mind, you need to extend your contracts on what staff are and are not allowed to say on social media. Many companies mandate that staff cannot identify themselves as staff on social media and then go ahead and say bad things about the company. This is actually quite legal because social media is considered a public platform. However, you need to go further and stop staff from openly attacking customers online, or openly portraying affiliations to groups, be they innocent groups like “Save the Whales” to more nefarious far-left or far-right groups. Quite often, people see your staff as spokespersons for your brand, and an overly aggressive online poster can do a lot of damage to your brand. Again, it is quite legal for you to restrict what staff says while under the banner of being your employee. They can say whatever they want on their social media if they are not identified on there as an employee of your company.
Can You Do More?
In essence, you can only do so much, and that is not a bad thing. There is a reason why influencers and businesses have a team of PR people behind them. It is because pushing an idea or a brand takes more than the efforts of one person. In fact, in most cases, it takes a massive team to push an idea or a brand, and it often takes a very long time. If you want to crank up the volume on your brand or your idea, then get in touch with Star Media Pr Group for some tailored help and advice. Get a team of experts in your corner and success will start becoming easier.
