It’s a social media world and we’re all living in it. Social media is all the rage and with good reason. It gives marketers the ability to spread the word about their company, quickly and easily, with very little impact on the bottom line. Whether you want to advertise a sale or hire business bloggers, social media makes your world a better, safer place.
Covering Your Bases
One of the best parts about social media is that there’s a platform for everyone. People who like video can use YouTube, while those who prefer still images can use Instagram. For plain text, there’s Twitter. And for people who like a little bit everything, Facebook is still as reliable as ever.
If variety is the spice of life, social media is living the most vibrant of lives. This can be a great thing, particularly if you have different sides of your company you’d like to feature. Based on the medium in question, you can show off different facets of your company, making you look unique and diverse at the same time.
Falling Through the Cracks
While social media’s many faces can be great for some, it’s actually a bad thing in many cases. There’s definitely pressure to be in as many places as possible in the social media stratosphere. On paper, it makes sense to have a presence in all of these platforms. In reality, though, it’s not quite so simple.
The problem is that spreading yourself too thin negates the core advantages of social media. Social media was adopted by marketers because it helped them to learn about their customers and communicate with them more quickly. By juggling too many social media accounts, you take away your ability to achieve these goals. Instead of posting an update to one account, you’re posting to many different accounts, and probably in many different forms of media. Rather than receiving valuable information about your customers in return, you’re mostly concerned about serving your many masters.
Worse yet, being on too many social media sites can mess with your customer service. The things you learn from, say, Facebook might conflict with the lessons LinkedIn has taught you. The two mediums may be totally different and have separate customer bases, but that won’t stop you from going nuts trying to interpret your data. Finally, having too much social media might get in the way of responding to customer complaints, which is the most important thing you do on social media. Since each complaint you miss almost always results in a former customer, it might not be worth your while to be all things to all people.
Keep it Simple
Sure, it’s nice to put up a fancy graphic full of social media icons on your website. But it’s worth far more to utilize one social media site very well. Your followers will recognize your quality and will share your posts with others, creating infinitely more value than you’d derive from half-heartedly trying to keep up with a dozen social media sites.
Think of social media as your avenue to show the world what you’re really about. Find the social media platform that allows you to best demonstrate what makes you unique, then attack that platform with everything you’ve got. In the end, you’ll find that you get a lot more out of that one site than you ever got from your previous bare-bones efforts.
Bryan B is a freelancer writer living in Long Island, N.Y. He may be the only writer in the entire world that doesn’t drink coffee.
