It seems that everyone wants to be involved in social media marketing from small businesses to large corporations. It may look easy to set up a campaign with the successes of a company like Dell or Comcast or have a Youtube video go viral like the “Old Spice Guy.” However, there is a lot more work involved. Social media marketing is not just setting up a Facebook profile and hope people visit your page. The same is true with Youtube. You cannot just create a video onto YouTube and hope for viral success. There are usually four key components to every social campaign (Research, Strategy, Engagement, and Measurement).

However, it is normally “Engagement” that is forgotten about when it comes time to market your business or product. Social media requires that you are social. That is why it is called Social Media. Again, it is not just sending your messages out there. You have to engage the different communities and users the same way as if you were dealing with a person in person. When was the last time you spoke to a random person and said “Get This Product” or “Come to this event?” Exactly, so why post blindly or participate in annoying behaviors.

It is best practice to research the community or group, listen to the community, and find out who are the real contributors or influencers are in the community from the average participant before you even type one word. Now you have a better understanding of the group and how communication flows to become fully engaged with the audience by asking questions, offer advice, and give some value to what you are saying to the community. Finding relevancy, knowing about your presence, and search engines are reasons why engagement has to be a central piece to any social media strategy and are elements to why engagement is important.

Social media can be very labor intensive and that is why automated social media tools can be appealing to find friends or people to like your page. Some companies or users make the mistake of starting off really big in social media and find out they cannot maintain that level of activity in the community and turn to tools like these to try and solve the issue or think that automated tools will make them grow very rapidly.

Audiences are not keen on being manipulated and they will shout or report you if they suspect that anything is out of the ordinary. That is why it is important to set the right expectations when you start engaging with the audience. For example, at some point everyone receives or has received a message similar to this.

Hi,

I took a look at your Facebook page and it looks great! I thought you might like to join my group since we both like music.

More than likely the person that would send a message like this message did not take a look at your page and does not care about your page. It is an automated message that was sent to thousands if not millions of users.

Having human qualities and engagements like asking or answering questions or sharing thoughts and ideas are all human engagement opportunities of establishing and building a relationship with your target audience that you cannot get from automation or by setting up a profile in a social media community that is not active. Having social activity in social media can lead to a lot of success if planned out and utilized properly. Using automation could create major consequences that could jeopardize your entire social media campaign.
 

- Rob Nilsen
Author, The LI Internets
robnilsen@lieconomy.com