Becoming Your Industry’s Social Media Leader

Social media is a tool, and just like any tool, if you know how to use it, it can be incredibly useful. If you don’t know how to use it, you could get seriously hurt.

Far too many marketers dabble in social media for their respective companies without having a clear vision of what they want to accomplish. It’s fine to use social media to keep users updated and to handle customer service issues, but there is so much more that can be gained by becoming your industry’s social media leader.

Establish and understand your goals

This isn’t groundbreaking information that you need to set goals in order to keep your efforts going in the right direction. The problem with social media goals is that often center only on metrics such as followers, shares, and likes, but these are only markers and can often be deceptive.

You can buy thousands of likes or followers but these aren’t genuine, so you’ll get no real value from them. You can run promotions to incentivize people to “like” your page, but, again, their heart might not be in it, and they’ll soon abandon you. Or you can create a space people want to come back to. These are the sort of people that actually help your business, because your goals should always come back to how you can help your business, not how you can look like you’re succeeding.

Get buy-in

With the amount of hype around social media marketing, it shouldn’t be hard to get executives on board to the idea of “being more involved in social.” Unfortunately, all this hype sometimes leads to inaccurate expectations from some, and stubbornness among individual contributors that are tired of hearing about social media.

What you need is to get everyone on the same page as far as what the real value of social media is to your business and how everyone can help.

Tap into your resources

Use everything valuable within your company. Utilize everyone in your company from the most technical positions to the most customer-facing people and everyone in-between. Those in your industry will face the same issues and triumphs that the people in your company face. Even the minutiae of the process can be interesting.

You can’t read about and know everything. Take advantage of these subject matter experts to clue you in to what’s important and what’s valuable in their little niche of the industry.

Forget you’re competing

A lot of marketers insist that you shouldn’t even mention your competition, let alone link to them or praise them or anything they do. But if you have a solid product or brand, don’t be afraid of the competition. Embrace it.

When sports teams compete, they don’t try to keep the other team from showing up to the game. They simply try to be better. Take this same approach and try to be better than the best. The way you’re going to do this in the social media world is to share the most valuable resources in your industry, regardless of the source.

Share your why

What you deliver on social media should promote your company’s values. Social media is the perfect platform for helping people understand more than what you do, but why you do the things you do. Telling this story is where you’ll find loyal customers because most products and services are comparable, but people want to align themselves with people and brands that share their values.

Join, but don’t control conversations

Social is about listening. Twitter makes Speak selectively. Monitor conversations and help when you can, especially in ways that aren’t self-serving. Just demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about and want to help people. Huge bonus points if you don’t do so in a creepy or invasive way, because this is a practice that can be have backlash if done poorly.

Let people help you help them

Ask real questions that engage your community. Let them tell you what they want to know about and can’t find good answers. This not only shows them that you care, but should give you a lot of direction for your content strategy.

Don’t be short sighted

Focus on your goals not your metrics. Don’t chase “likes” and “shares.” Contests and incentives that inflate your metrics are setting you up for disaster in the long-term. You aren’t getting real value from this type of promotion, and you’ll be establishing unrealistic expectations from the rest of the marketing department. These promotions can potentially add value if you have a plan in place to genuinely engage your windfall of new followers, but this isn’t a sustainable practice to become a leader in your industry.

Put something into the world that people actually like and want to share, then they’ll press the right buttons. Share valuable content others are creating and you will soon become the sort of place a community wants to come back to. This is the long game that will return real benefits for your company.

Reap what you sow

Gary Vaynerchuk’s marketing insight that “Everybody wants to be a hunter, but nobody wants to be a farmer,” perfectly evaluates the field of social media marketers. The hunter looks for a big win today but often goes home empty handed and hungry. The farmer is patient and sets himself up for consistent, reliable results after months of hard work.

To be a leader in any field, you’re going to have to put in the long, hard work and avoid the temptation to just get followers. You’ll need to earn them, but once you start to earn them, social media platforms allow for exponential growth. The big, short-term wins fail to compound as people unlike your page and move on. But if you’ve taken the time to develop real relationships and provide insight and information, you’ll see real returns.

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