Optimizing Changes In Social Media to Grow Your Business

For several years now, social media has provided a much touted marketing platform for any business with an e-marketing component. Social media was believed to the most powerful way, if not the only relevant way, to generate word-of-mouth buzz in an online landscape. And social media provided the rare but intoxicating chance that an e-marketer’s greatest dream might be fulfilled and a marketing message might go “viral”.

Optimizing social media was simple at first. A company only needed a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and someone to update them on a regular basis. But now things have become more complex. The competition has increased, social media is expanding beyond Twitter and Facebook, and social media consumers have become more savvy and less receptive to second rate marketing efforts.

How can a clever e-business owner or marketer keep up with these changes? Is social media still relevant at all? And if it isn’t, then where has consumer attention gone, and how can we follow?

The first rule of present social media is as follows: People don’t do things or buy things because Facebook told them to. They do things and buy things because a trusted, admired friend told them to, and that friend happened to convey this message using Facebook.

If you intend to use social media to advance your marketing strategy, don’t be confused about the nature of social influence. Technology or no technology, social pressures have worked the same way for a thousand years and will (hopefully) continue working for a thousand more. Don’t expect this web tool or that one to do the work for you. DO expect the social network—hundreds of human opinions formed in human hearts and expressed through human mouths—to do the work for you, and use available technology to make this happen.

Try to deploy your message the same way you would in a world without Facebook and Twitter: Get influential people to love your product. These influential people, plus the respect afforded to them by their friends, plus their wish to share positive experiences with those friends, plus the means to do so, can send your messages sailing out onto the digital waves like so many little boats heading out to sea.

Influential people did not become influential by bombarding their friends with spam. They also didn’t get there by being shameless, desperate, indiscriminate, or awkward. Think about the coolest person you know. Then be like that.

That’s what we all try to do. And that’s why it works.



Alex Smith is an Online Marketing Consultant at SevenAtoms Inc., a San Francisco based content writing, content marketing and social media marketing firm.

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