Social Media Today

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Social media today is like no other animal marketers have ever encountered.

The way people interact on social media is on everyone’s minds.

What gets the most likes, what gets the most customer interaction, what will make people actually visit my website and care about my product, brand, business?

Let’s face it guys, in social media today your “like” count means pretty much nothing but a number.

Marketers have used so many different strategies and tactics to get likes on their pages: competitions, votes, etc.  Now people have liked so many business pages that they cleverly BLOCK their updates so that businesses don’t take up their facebook wall!

Social media today is all about genuine interaction!  Here’s a few simple ways to take a smaller list and make more sales from it!

Facebook Today

Stop focusing on the likes, and start focusing on the traffic, on the interaction.  If you are starving for a number to focus on… focus on the comments your updates actually get.

Ask questions that really help…. and here’s the kicker:

Answer questions.

If you are using a personal profile this works much, much better.  You want to show a genuine interest in other people.  That is what will make them show a genuine interest in you!

Twitter Today

Twitter is also all about answering questions.  You want to give people a reason to tweet to you.  Don’t just put out your brand, don’t be afraid of soliciting questions.

You can move your questions forum to a regular Twitter party where people can ask you anything.  You can reach out to others asking about a topic in your field and answer their questions!

Don’t be afraid to reach out to strangers on Twitter.

A good rule of thumb for social media today:

Use Facebook for building strong, deep, reciprocal relationships.

Use Twitter for reaching out to meet new people and create new relationships.

At some point it’s a good idea to give your Twitter followers a reason to connect to you on Facebook.

(As the kids put it: Facebook is for your friends, Twitter is for the people you wish were your friends).

Social media today is constantly changing.

Tactics and special offers are working less. Telling good stories and connecting on a human level is working more.

Connect to others and see your social media strategies start to really take off!