As I give thanks for my wonderful and supportive husband, family and friends, and for my health, happiness and successful first year in business, I also want to give thanks for something not as important in life but that I deal with every day.
I spend large chunks of my day on social media, managing sites for clients and my own business. My personal love of social media is woven into that, as I communicate with friends around the world via Facebook, get the latest news from Twitter and share hilarious cat videos. (I just can’t help myself.)
So, for this Thanksgiving, I present to you what I’m most thankful for on social media:
- No robots. It’s refreshing to see smart, informative tweets that are clearly written by people, sometimes in the moment, sometimes scheduled a few hours earlier. Tweets that are sent automatically from news aggregators or the account’s own website, simply with headlines and a link, are tiresome. For Twitter to work, we need to communicate with each other, and we need to engage with our audience. No one likes to call a company only to get an automated voice on the phone. We like humans.
- Those who understand that content creation is necessary. It sounds like a no-brainer, but, in fact, there are many
associations and organizations that are not creating original content. And without their own content, they are forced to share only others’ content and have very little to direct people back to their own website — not to mention, no content to brand themselves as experts, educate their audience or start conversations. While social media can’t be “me, me, me” 100 percent of the time, it must not be “them, them, them” all the time either. You need to create your own content and share it, and I appreciate it when organizations and businesses already understand that and I don’t have to convince them of this reality. - TweetDeck. TweetDeck is owned by Twitter. While you might prefer a different social media manager if you have multiple platforms, I prefer TweetDeck for Twitter and use Facebook directly to schedule Facebook posts. TweetDeck offers seamless integration of photos into a Twitter feed, without cumbersome links, and it shows you the image in the preview section. But my favorite part about TweetDeck has to be that I can sign in as myself and then add multiple clients to my account, easily toggling back and forth. Until recently, I used Hootsuite exclusively, but the free version requires me to log in to my client’s account, thus not allowing me to work on multiple accounts at the same time. This is simply not practical.
- “Experts” who admit they’re not experts. No one is an expert in social media. I’ve found that the smartest people I’ve met working in social media strategy eschew the labels “expert” and “guru.” They admit that social media is so vast and changes so rapidly that no one is truly an expert. It’s about trying new campaigns and strategies and seeing what works for you. Ask questions, learn from others, but adapt the lessons to create your own strategy for your own audience.
Is there anything on social media that you witness and sigh, “yes,” because that person just gets it? Share in the comments below. And have a very happy Thanksgiving.