Imagine your social media as the voice of your business. It’s your one real chance to reach out to everybody across the world – even if they have never heard of you and were never looking to find you. How you use and present your social media says much about your business too. It helps people understand the personality of your business quickly and for that reason what you say and do and how you action them is very important.
Because of this many businesses use their social media far to cautiously, partly through trepidation of using a new tool they maybe don’t fully understand, partly to avoid moving away from a straight business approach. Yet, playing it too safe probably means you are wasting your opportunity and being honest probably wasting your time and effort on social media altogether. Make your voice different in the mass of voices out there in the social crowd by making your opinion clear.
Opinions needn’t mean confrontational
Why do people follow others on social media? They want to hear or read what they have to say. So make sure you say something and something worthwhile. A banal text link about a new product can be instantly jazzed up with a question or use of exciting words. Then the link becomes enticing an clickable. Of course you would say your new product is “fantastic”, “powerful” etc but it gives your post immediate dynamism and if you aren’t using those sort of impacting words about your own products the psychology is that you don’t really have much faith in them, so how can you expect others to get excited about them.
Say what you think
The key to successful social media is creating a conversation, engagement, gaining a response and comments. If what you post clearly isn’t from you, or it isn’t clear in what your stance on it is, people won’t know how to respond to it and more often than not, just simply won’t respond. If it’s worth posting it is worth thinking about and giving your slant on it and if it is controversial and you are retweeting or sharing it from somebody else make sure you identify what your thoughts on it are.
Advice can be opinion too
Getting off the fence and making a definite point of backing one opinion isn’t the only way to express your thoughts and share your expertise. If there are maybe two options people can be considering and you can see pros and cons for both, dependant on what the final end use, budgets, requirements are etc, then saying so is also a opinion that others will value, take on board and follow. Again just sharing links like “there’s this one and this one” won’t have impact. Instead something more creative like “the battle between….” is suddenly instantly attractive for people to want to read more or share.
Social media is all about the spark. Those successful in the sphere have a clear personality and identifiable approach to what they do. Make a stance and make it clear and you will make more of a success of your social media, just make sure you don’t push it too far and become obnoxious.
