Video Monday 17: Every Update Is Somebody’s First Update

If you’re tasked with using Twitter and Facebook to promote discounts or offers, how should you respond?

It sounds like I sort of contradict myself at the end when I say you should be engaging, after talking for several minutes about how to use Twitter if you don’t have time to be, well, engaging.

I meant be interesting. Be exciting. Be worth paying attention to.

Transcript:
Sings: Video Monday, video Monday, it’s a Monday so here’s a video!

So today on Video Monday I want to very quickly talk about, kind of a related conversation I had with a friend of mine who’s been to some degree tasked with being on Twitter without being able to have the resources, whether it’s money or human, to do it the best (or what I would suggest to be the best way possible) so what do you do?

And I think if you’re in a small business, or really any organization, you might have been tasked with this before. A higher-up may have told you okay, we need to be on social media, we need to be on Twitter. Go. But it’s just you, and also you have to do all your other jobs.

So basically don’t be on there all day, you don’t have time to be engaging with people, just put out promotions, just tell people what the discounts are and why they should come to us. Just kind of do that regularly. Of course you probably know that maybe that’s not the best way to approach it. Maybe that’s going to be just kind of annoying to people and not really valuable, so what do you do?

So I suggest that if that’s the task that you’ve been commissioned with the first thing you should do is explain to the person who’s told you to do that, explain to them in terms they can relate to a little easier.

Explain that that’s a little like saying we need to do an email marketing campaign. We need to contact everyone we’ve ever met and have their email addresses for. We need to send to them all, we don’t have time to specialize emails to each individual person, or even kind of demographic. We need to send everyone the same email. It’s going to be the same kind of specials and discounts, but none of them are really that interesting. We need to do that probably every day or every week. We need to send these people emails over and over and over again. Just to make sure that they’re up to date with what we’re talking about. Even if it’s really not that interesting.

So explain to them that it’s kind of like that. Which if you didn’t catch the meaning there, that’s spam. Even if you signed up for that kind of update it’s still spammy. That’s not what you want. You may have signed up for it, but it’s not what you want.

So explain to them if you’ve been tasked with updating Twitter that way, or your Facebook fan page that way, even if someone signed up for that, that’s not what they signed up for. They may have signed up for the account but they didn’t sign up for that sort of update. They kind of… they expected something better than that.

They may have followed your Twitter account because you announced a contest, so they felt that they had to sign up because they wanted updates on the contest. And now they’ve been suckered into getting these annoying pointless updates.

Same with Facebook. Maybe a friend invited them to the fan page because the friend was part of the contest that they had to sign up other people to become fans. So they just signed up out of obligation to someone else and now they’re getting your spammy updates? That’s unfair to everybody involved. So explain it to them in those terms. Someone may have signed up to become a fan, but they may not want that sort of update.

So, I think the general rule is, if you don’t have the staff or the resources or the money or anything to make really really engaging connections with people on Facebook or Twitter and you are forced, for whatever reason, whether that’s time, or because someone has told you you have to do this, assume that every single update you send out is someone’s first update from something they never signed up for.

Assume it’s a cold call. Do something really, really interesting. Make it worth their time. Assume they never asked for this in the first place. So you should always be assuming that everyone’s update is the first update they’ve ever gotten from you. Which means you’re going to have to be really interesting, you’re going to have to be really engaging, and you’re going to have to try really hard to make it worth that persons time.

Thanks everybody, bye.