Real Ways to Connect with Social Media

What does meaningful connection have to do with business? Only everything.

Connection motivates us:

• If I am cool and hip these people will like me.
• If I am honest and good these people will like me.
• If I say this, I will be intelligent and people will admire me.
• If I have this I will look rich and people will want to admire me.
• If I buy this I will look beautiful and people will want to be around me.

We are all looking for those things that will help us achieve connection. Human beings have the uncanny ability to find and weed out a message that reaches our own idea of what we need to achieve that sense of connection with others. We have spent our whole lives discerning what will and what won’t and however right or wrong our ideas may be we are totally addicted to them.

In business and marketing we know that buying is emotional and we know that messages must be clear, concise and consistent to reach our intended audience. They must contain some level of sincerity to resonate with the right crowd. Still it shocks me how many businesses miss the mark when it comes to connecting with their customer through Social Media.

Take into consideration how we approach marketing a product. We put time and attention into the packaging a product to attract a particular audience. This all tells a story and makes a promise; throw in some customer service and warranty and we’re in business.

Nowadays we have more mediums to gather statistics and information for marketing than we ever have. We can get consumer’s money and gather all their personal details so we can invade their privacy whenever we please and sell to them all the time. We can bombard their inbox, we can watch their movements on the internet, make them register their warranties so we know how old they are and what they have in their coffee every morning. How great is that?!

We know what our market wants more than ever, but how is your business using this information and is it helping you establish trust and loyalty.

Consider a sincere way to connect with your market

Here’s a couple of different ways to look at Social Media:

• A great way to get in consumers’ faces more and collect more data, get more backlinks.
• A great way to give back to the community, connect with people honestly and learn, not study their behavior, but just listen to what it is that they want.

If you have ever read through a technology blog you will see that independent techies are the smartest marketers on earth. They put out technological solutions for their market then they create a blog or forum. Their market responds, saying things like “hey, how do I do this?”, “I need this” and “I want this and this and that”. A technology product usually has a planned version release schedule that may or may not incorporate these dynamic requests, but often the designer is in constant contact with their market this way. This clever interaction leaves a trail of useful information or “how to” problem solving that benefits future generations of users.

Sure they may have info about their premium paid version and perhaps you can sign up for their newsletter, but the underlying purpose and intent is to create a service and get feedback to help meet the needs of their market. In order to create a true connection the intent should be to provide real value at no extra expense to the customer, whether that be time, information or money.

Try Social Media as a customer tools.

If you want web traffic make Twitter and your Blog a customer service arena, you will find that sooner or later your customers will start to tell you things of their own free will and you won’t even have to drag it out of them, or go through their garbage, or even clog up their inbox for that matter.

These are your future customer service tools . . . get used to them:

• Twitter
• YouTube
• FaceBook
• Blogs

If you start providing value in these forums and you want SEO, then you’ve just accomplished it. Soon you will have trail of information that’s not just of use to your business, but actually also for your customers. It gets indexed and linked. There are many other possibilities with Social Media but this post is just offering the idea of one clear purpose. Try looking at Social Media like customer service and a required part of your business rather than just marketing.  What do YOU think builds loyalty, impressions or connections?

-Amy Rogerson