SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week we asked: Do worry about whether your brand is interesting enough to sustain a social media presence?
- Yes: 64.95%
- No: 28.87%
- Not sure: 6.19%
There is good news for the 65% of you who are worrying about your brand; it is the exact right emotion to ensure that your brand is, in fact — or does become — interesting. You see, not all worrying is bad. A solid dose of worrying can be a good thing and the perfect medicine to improve your brand’s engagement and interest level.
When you worry, you think about the problem you are facing and devise solutions to prevent the problem or overcome it. The key thing to remember, though, is that you must transform your worry into action, not more worrying or stress.
Here’s how I would attack the problem.
- Address your social-content strategy. Interesting doesn’t happen by chance. It takes a concerted effort to organize, plan and generate conversational topics that matter to your customers. You need a macro view of the world they live in versus a micro view of how your product or service affects them.
- Hire right. The success of your social media presence rests on the talent you put in place to manage it. Fill your externally facing social media positions with individuals who are creative, bright, helpful, empathetic, generous and kind. At the minimum, you need someone capable of being “interesting.” Social media and their influence on consumers are far too important for this aspect to be ignored.
- Get ready … Actually ask your customers what they are interested in! There is no better way for you to become more interesting than by getting feedback from customers. This can be done via a survey, a social media contest or even an actual phone conversation. Yep, I said it. Call some customers. Get to know them, ask them about your ideas and ask them for ideas. They’ll love that you are including them in the story of your brand. If you go so far as to get and use a customer’s idea, give the person credit for it. By doing so, you’ll likely get other ideas submitted.
- Review your results and analytics. Facts are friends, and you are likely sitting on a treasure trove of them in the results of your previous social media activity and website analytics. What content worked? What didn’t? What blog posts generated the most activity? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth — all of this data are worth much more than you realize. Use them to your advantage.
By starting with these suggestions, you will be well on your way to worrying less, acting more and improving the overall interest level of your brand on the social Web. That said, the bottom line is that the level of interest your brand generates on the social Web has a direct correlation to the amount of resources you are willing to invest in it. Being interesting takes a lot more than showing up to the party.
This poll analysis was written by SmartBlogs contributor Jeremy Victor. He is the president of business-to-business content-marketing agency Make Good Media and editor-in-chief of B2Bbloggers.com. For more of his writing, visit B2Bbloggers.com and follow him on Twitter and Google+.