I hate social media marketers, including myself. For everything we do right, there’s so much more we can do better to help advocate for ourselves and for the clients, fans, and customers we interact with daily.
Thankfully, we’re slowly moving away from the trend of ninja-guru-warrior-master-expert-titles, but we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of building business credibility and building advocacy for the average person.
Without those thousands of average schmucks who are dumber than us, where would we be building our fan bases? Who would actually come ‘like’ that awesome Facebook page? We have unrivaled access to our consumers and the ability pass information to them. Their engagement and interaction is our lifeblood. Why don’t we do more to protect them?
My best guess is because it’s hard.
We shy away from discussing deeper issues and instead write and rewrite the same tips about getting your content shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever. Someone has already written those posts, they’ve probably written it better than you, and we all know you were just writing that to get more traffic for the day.
It’s easy to sit down and write a few tweets or a funny Facebook update, and sharing a link is as simple as copy and pasting. Education, on the other hand, takes hard work.
It’s like when you go home for Christmas and teach Mom and Dad about their new computer, but on steroids. No one wants to do educate beyond the quick fix of a tip, and you know in a you’re going to do it over and over again because of how crazy some people are online and their ability to ruin nice things. Still, when you get that lightbulb moment from someone else, for a moment it gets better.
Set up a user’s privacy setting and they use Facebook for a year. Then, they get a virus app that posts porn on all their friends’ walls and they give up on Facebook. Teach a user how to manage privacy settings and protect their account, and they stay engaged for a lifetime. Or at least until we get something better.
We have a responsibility to help protect and advocate for our users. Don’t let them down.
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