Social media seems to be everywhere nowadays. Businesses and individuals alike have found its amazing power of creating memes, making marketing campaigns (deliberate or otherwise) go viral and flooding us with information.
How do you balance the value as both a listener and a communicator in social media? Especially if you're wondering whether it's really worth the trouble posting on the multitude of different sites if you want to promote your business. Here are a few thoughts concentrating mostly on the communicator perspective.
Introductory rambling
Quantity there is, no doubt. Quality as well but it's much more sparse. With the elimination of the threshold to publish has also come the elimination of any quality control. Signal-to-noise ratio is pretty abysmal. Of course we're also provided tools to manage that in the form of machine learning algorithms in the background making a profile of what we like and catering to our existing biases, creating a bubble around us, filtering and showing views that we already agree with.
Except when people want to feel angry. Then they do stampede together, hashtags a-flying in formation, emotional spillage abound. When you happen to grab this sword by the wrong end, the global outpouring of anger coming your way over a misinterpreted slight, Fortuna just might draw the worst of the cards from her deck. So be wary, here be dragons.
Balance for the content creator
I see two essential balance aspects in maximizing the personal value of social media (from private or business perspective): first balancing the time spent on social media and the various sites and secondly balancing the audience value versus just personal posting feel-good (although there is overlap).
Balancing time spent on social media is essential since we all have limited time and many of us would like to get as much out of it as possible. Social media can be fun and posting can simply be entertainment but if you think about this from a value perspective, the considerations change.
How many posts a day? How many social media sites should I post to? Same content to everything or customized? How much value do I get from spending more time on considering the posts? What kinds of diminishing returns are there?
You can see and hear all kinds of figures being thrown about but I think the most essential thing is understanding what the audience is looking for in each of the different sites. The actual numbers, how much to spend time on posting, which sites to choose from stem from this understanding. I'll list a few of the relevant sites and how I personally see them and use them to give you an example.
Facebook
People have many different approaches to Facebook where business and pleasure are intertwined. Businesses need visibility at least in the form of pages which, if nothing else, direct the viewer to a more actively maintained location. Personal approaches vary from very value conscious to very spontaneous and that's entirely individual. Decide your private approach based your friending criteria and your chosen / implicit personal brand but please don't be one of those people who make stuff up just to look cool. Business approach should depend on the kind of activity and there are many good articles on the subject simple one google search away.
Personally I'm very liberal about friending on Facebook but this naturally also leads to a heavier self-filtering of posted content (when the posts go to your RL friends, your family, your colleagues, your acquaintances, your x y z etc. then you tend to leave those crazy posts out). I only post stuff that I personally find interesting but there's an additional filter on whether it would be interesting to my friend list as well (which I apply both to linked content and original personal posting). At the same time I want to share some of what's going on and share cool stuff I find on the internet as well as spark interesting discussion. All of this is value-adding to the audience I have in mind. There's no schedule. It depends on what is happening at the moment and what kinds of interesting articles and videos I happen to come across.
LinkedIn
The professional CV site. Nowadays it's quite hard to fathom a reason not to be here. Keeping your profile up-to-date simply opens up a world of possibilities. You don't even need to be active by yourself, the armies of online recruiters (at least in hot fields) make sure of that. Naturally the forementioned signal-to-noise ratio also applies here but since it's a paid service there's at least some natural filtering. People don't expect a lot of content publishing but especially if you're looking for job (in the future) then posting quality content shouldn't hurt.
Instagram
For most people I would imagine this is a more personal channel. Cute pictures, fun pictures, terrible pictures. Surely there are businesses with specific kind of brand or simply very visual emphasis which can really benefit as well.
Personally: fun personal pictures.
Twitter
The two-edged blade. The contemporary culmination of lowering of the publishing threshold. There are people posting trivialities, empty minutiae, digital baubles that don't even have the visual appeal. Vomiting the emotion of the moment, a digital output valve. There are also the people concentrating on providing value with every tweet. Which would you rather follow? Which do you follow? On which side of the semi-artificial dichotomy do you fall yourself?
The two-edged blade. due to The Limit, forced to concentrate on the essential. In other words you're either posting simple thoughts in understandable format or complex thoughts that 99% of readers will misinterpret (to varying degrees). The less space you have to express your thought, it better be damn well written or people will drag the short form through their various personally differing associations and draw up different conclusions. When the proverbial shit hits the fan with this misinterpretation, the power of the social media can take outright scary forms. This then easily leads to taking either the path of political overcorrectness (which doesn't evoke emotion on which the entire system thrives and thus gets forgotten) or the path of over-provocativeness to the demise of rationality.
The highly skilled can masterfully wield the rapier of provocation to affect emotion and control the tide of the outpouring. Ensuring that the sword isn't ripped from your hands isn't trivial and I'm the wrong person to give any tips on the practicals.
For most people it would be a good start to be conscious on the exact benefit of twittering instead of just doing because everyone else is as well. Whether you want to get wide circulation via emotion and provocation (and in some rare cases thoughtful and insightful) or whether you concentrate on providing value to a more focused target audience. It's not a dichotomy despite me formulating it that way.
It's probably useful to tap into trending hashtags if what you want to express has some related relevant angle.
Personally I'm honing my approach to Twitter. My objective is to go for small edgy snippets to which an essential insight of the article / blog post I'm linking to is condensed. And yes, I always tend to be linking to blog posts / articles that express the thought in much more detail. At the very least the people who actually are interested in more meaningful, deeper discussion have the content available for such even if the initial spark was a simplistic provocative thumbnail of the larger picture.
Blogs
Challenge: articulating complex thoughts & understanding while trying to minimize the actual amount of text. Blog post is not challenged by an artificially low character limit but rather the reader's capacity to digest it. Can be a good combination with Twitter where tweet is the spark and blog the meat.
Youtube / video sites
Ten minute videos with 30 seconds worth of written content. Please don't do this. Or at the very least provide the transcript. Not that videos don't have benefits (visual elements, you can listen to it podcast-style while doing something else, etc) but the modern style of focusing on visuals / emotion at the cost of content is highly questionable.
The benefits to people who can actually produce high quality videos is obvious.
Wrapping up the balance
Hopefully having made it this far some of the writing helped you clarify some of the benefits of social media and spark some thoughts as to how to hone your approach. I didn't provide ready solutions but my intention was to give food for thought. Experiment and be wary of thoughtlessly spending too much of your valuable time on social media but do realize that there definitely are gains to be had. Select the right sites that align with your personal image or business.
Most importantly, know your audience and realize how the medium affects it. The same people on two different social media sites might be after different things or at least from slightly different approaches.
Always keep in mind the value you're providing to your target audience. Don't just post but post with intent. I don't know if the age old adage of "if you have nothing good to say, stay silent" really applies in social media but at least the polar opposite is still not true.
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