Businesses - I get it.
Social media is scary. You see the potential to develop strong relationships and loyalty with your customers. But you also see all the pitfalls and hear stories about businesses being screwed royally by one stray message.
Honestly, no one wants to deal with one more inbox of angry customers.
But adding some buttons so people can share your website isn’t a social media strategy.
A social media strategy takes time and effort. It’s hard work that most of us avoid when we’re on social networks because we want to escape our lonely existence of sitting at home in our underwear watching another episode of Roseanne on Netflix. You need to figure out what the hell your goals are, who will do the work (because it is work, chump), and what your worst case scenarios are.
And as soon as you create it, you probably need to adjust it. Doesn’t that suck?
So when you put an icon on your website to share it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, that’s not a social media strategy. That doesn’t even make sense. Most people want to share useful and fun content. Not a corporate website. Your corporate website isn’t fun.
Those buttons say “Promote me even though I’m doing jack shit for you.” Is that what you want to tell the people who pay you?
Figure out how to talk to human beings. Human beings who love you, hate you, and who are complete psychopaths. They may be crazy, but at the end of they day, they are human, and however feeble and weak the connection they create on the social network, they’ll feel better for it.
So take down your crappy share buttons. Say “Fuck you” to the idiot who put them up there, and get to work creating real conversations and relationships with the people who care enough to praise, complain, and interact with your company.
It will be worth it.
So where’s the FU button on here? I see tweet, facebook, linked in, tumblr, stumble, digg (is dead), delciious, but no FU on a post about that? It just seems like it should be here. I wonder what it will do when I click it too.
It will play this:
“A social media strategy takes time and effort. … You need to figure out what the hell your goals are, who will do the work (because it is work, chump), and what your worst case scenarios are.”
Well said. Thing is, most “Social Media Experts” in my area apparently think a “social media strategy” consists on opening Twitter and Facebook accounts and saying things like “Good morning everybody!” or “How’s your day going!?!?”. And posting pictures.
Worst? People pay them to do that. Sigh.
I wish I got paid to be a normal, social human being too.
I’m just happy I’ve read a lot of stuff before I’d put those (damn) buttons on the page.
I have to agree that it’s much bigger than just those buttons (although the buttons ain’t coming down).
It is also very much more satisfying to actually write a strategy and have some sense of where to go and how to go about achieving this.
But.., it does take a whole lot of educating in order to get the company to fall in line.