So many business mistakes are made in the name of efficiency. What is the point of being efficient if you are simply doing the wrong thing, even though you are doing it well?
Efficient? Yes, but also awful
Last week, attendees on our “Building a Strong Tourism Business” course expressed concern as to how long it might take to “do” social media. We hear this all the time. For newbies, all these social media accounts seem like a lot of work. A visitor to the group, mentioned that time need not be an issue, because one could use a tool to post to every account at once. Yes, you could use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck or a host of other tools to do this. You could simply open one of these tools, blast out a few updates that would go everywhere at once, (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn at the very least), and log off, never having to visit the communities in question. I would agree that that is efficient. But also, it is quite, quite awful. So you really shouldn’t do it.
Why Social Media “Efficiency” is Awful
For social media to be effective, you need to be, well, social. Blasting out one way messages is just a “me – me -me” strategy that won’t win you friends or influence. In addition, the way that updates display in each of these social platforms is different. You can post must longer updates in both LinkedIn and Facebook than you can in Twitter for example. So if you post from LinkedIn to Twitter, unless you have curtailed your LinkedIn post to 140 characters, your post will be truncated. This annoys people on Twitter, who are there to play by the 140 character rule, and that’s what they expect. It’s like you came to play tennis dressed as a deep sea diver. It’s just wrong. Different groups of people join different platforms for a reason. If a connection wanted to see your tweets, they wouldn’t go to LinkedIn to see them, they’d go to Twitter. Also, if they also follow you on Twitter, they don’t want to have to wade through your tweets all over again on LinkedIn. A volume of posting identically on different forums brings you close to being a spammer. It’s okay to cross post sometimes, (i.e. one update posted to many forums simultaneously), but doing it all the time is just disrespectful to your communities in the name of efficiency.
Be Effective
Use the right platform to post to your community. Engage, reply, share, like, retweets all in the right place. Don’t mix your messages, they don’t translate well. Join communities that work for your business, use some more than others, and be selective. Efficiency is over-rated, you just need to do the right things well. In other words, be an effective social media manager, not an efficient one.
What do you think of social media "cross posting"? Please let us know in the comments below!
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Social media is meant to be social, I agree, but we are social in many, many different ways - that's what makes life interesting.
I tell people "if you don't like it, unfriend, unfollow or unconnect", simple solution!