Best practices in social media marketing
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Practice, especially best practices, makes perfect
Chris Brogan pointed me to Mitch Joel’s “ social media marketing best practices project.” The goals are two-fold:
- Push smart people all across the Web to document their ideas for best practices in social media marketing
- Drum up some link love for Mitch Joel’s blog (and doing so in a creative, compelling way like this demonstrates a social media marketing best practice, no doubt)
Brogan’s chosen best practice is “Learn how to listen. Simple, I know. But it’s a best practice. Here are five tools I use for listening, and here’s my take on listening to Twitter.”
Mitch Joel makes the case for consistency:
Consistency. Be consistent. In everything that you do. Have a consistent username that you use in all of your channels (mine is mitchjoel). Use the same photo, so that you are recognizable in all of these channels. [...] Don’t blast out five pieces of content or join three online social networks and fade away. Choose one, stick with it and keep at it. Be more like the tortoise instead of the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.
I could go on all day with ideas to help enlighten other social media marketers, but Mitch challenges me to pick just one. Brogan took my first idea, listening — the single most important item — so I’m going to go a very different direction and step away from tactical best practices.
My best suggestion: Spend some time getting to know people in “your community,” getting to know what’s important to them, what they talk about, what gets them excited, what you can do for them — without worrying about the return on your investment.
Don’t spend all of your time working without goals, investing time and energy without thinking about some potential return. But don’t spend all of your time thinking about ROI, either. It might be hard, but it’ll be worth it.
And really, working like this — getting to know people as people, without thinking so much about your own goals, without thinking about getting an R on your I — will have a positive ROI. So maybe I can sum up my idea in a more simple statement:
Be selfless and be patient.
(And I’m also instructed to A) point to some other folks who have written well on this subject and B) tag some folks who might be prompted to share some good ideas on the topic, so… Albert Maruggi, Chris Lynn and Jason Falls — consider yourselves tagged. You’re it.)
Related items
Memes are normally irritating. This one is pretty cool and useful. I promise to put some thought into it and post something next week. Thanks for thinking of me for this.
For me, it’s all about “community.” Whether you’re blogging for business or pleasure, your success is going to be rooted upon your ability to build and nurture your community.
Spend time with your readers, get to know who they are, what they like, what they want because ultimately, you’re writing for them. They’ll motivate you and inspire you to keep delivering content…engaging content.
Be genuine…build and cultivate a strong community around your blog. If you’re using social media for business, by building a strong community first, you’re ensuring that those members will be more receptive to your message. But don’t abuse that trust and don’t be disingenuous because in today’s information age, it’s easy to move from one brand to the next…
I guess that’s a better — or at least more meaningful — way of saying what I tried to convey above: Be genuine and don’t do it just to sell or just to have a place to put links or ads. When you do it right, and you let your voice and your personality shine, the success — whatever that might be — will follow.
[...] Best Practices in Social Media Marketing Writing Project found its way to my inbox from Mike Keliher, a frequent commentor and digital friend. Yes, it’s a meme and no, I don’t particularly [...]
[...] not "How am I going to get all these people to buy". A good way to find out is to listen [...]