So you’re going to use social media to promote your business? Great—I love to hear that. I’m such a proponent, especially when it’s one part of a cohesive content strategy. If you get it right, you’re making efficient use of all your content, using it to form valuable connections with your online audience.
If you’re at this point, that means that you’ve gotten past what I call Phase 1 of the Resistance to Social Media. In the last post, I characterized this as a bias rooted in fear. This bias causes a lot of people to not even start. While fear is a powerful thing, it shouldn’t stop you from taking advantage of the huge opportunity that’s in front of you and your business.
But what happens once you get past Phase 1? Often, there’s a Phase 2 to the Resistance. It looks a little bit like this:
OK, I’m going to try social media for my business, but I’m going put in the smallest amount of effort into it as possible.
Watch the video to hear more about this.
Yes, you want to optimize. You want your inputs to result in outputs. And that balance has to be worth the effort. But what to you think the result will be if you only put in a minimal effort?
Even though it seems like smart business to test the soil first to make sure it’s fertile, I still call this a form of resistance, because it says to me that you haven’t bought into it. You don’t really believe that it’s going to be beneficial. But the catch-22 is that if you don’t put forth a real effort, it has a very low chance of working.
I get a lot of prospective clients who have been through both Phases, and have reached the conclusion that, “social media didn’t work for us.” Think about that for a second. Social media is just the plumbing. It’s just a platform. It’s like saying that e-mail doesn’t work for business. It’s hard to imagine any business—B2B or B2C—that can’t benefit from developing connections with the prospective customers.
Getting Past the Resistance
The reasons I hear (or uncover) most often are:
- Consistency. Didn’t produce regularly.
- Persistence. Didn’t stick with it long enough.
- Patience. Didn’t give it enough time.
- Content. Didn’t get the nuances right.
- Timing and frequency. Posted too much or too little.
- Broadcast mindset. All output rather than bi-directional.
Which one is the weakest link in your business? The nuances are really important. But if you do it right, it can have a huge positive impact on your business. What I like about it is that it’s mostly art, with a little science mixed in.
- The art is about making connections using creative content that educates, entertains, or inspires.
- The science is that it’s like a experiment, where you are constantly adding new stimuli into environment, observing the results, and iterating.
There’s a method to it, which is what I try to teach in my blog and podcast. Since I’ve gotten a lot of questions about social media lately, I created a series called The Social Media Strategy Series as a part of my podcast, Marketing Without the Marketing.
The idea is to share my own strategies as a practitioner so that you can make your own decisions about which platform might good for you—and how to attack it once you decide. I’m covering one platform per episode so that I can do a deep dive on each. Let me know if there’s a topic you want me to cover—most of these episodes are derived from listener questions.
Please subscribe in iTunes – or any of your favorite podcast apps. If you like what you hear, please leave a rating or review. That help me a lot, and it helps other people find the show too.
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This post is dedicated to my mom, Teresa Boezi, who would have been 70 years old today. She did everything with a full-on effort, which was one of the many things I loved about her.
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