Pull Together

By Sanya Weathers

The title of today’s blog started out as “Getting All Your Social Media Horses Pointed In the Same Direction.” I was going for an extended metaphor. If you have multiple horses, and they aren’t pointed in the same direction, you aren’t going to pull your cart very far. You also need to harness the horses together, so their combined strength is brought to bear on one cart and not losing power by pulling at different rates or fighting each others. You need to put blinders on the easily distracted horses. The person holding the reins should know where the heck he’s going.

My metaphors usually fall apart a lot sooner than this one.

What am I on about?

Social media channels have a lot of power to pull people towards you and push your company toward your goals. I see a lot of people failing to coordinate their different channels, and they waste quite a bit of… well, horsepower.

–    Know where you’re going. What is your overall goal? If you have multiple goals, have you prioritized them? A typical social media plan might have something like this for goals:

1.    Drive potential customers to product site
2.    Communicate with existing customers about opportunities
3.    Socialize with dedicated customers

You need to think about every post you make on every channel. The majority of your posts should serve your top priority. If you find that most of your posts (or tweets, or pics, or blurbs, or whatever) are serving lower priorities, you’re doing it wrong.

–    Focus. The thing about social media is that it can be a black hole of time suck. Clicking links, meme contests, and fun. But as with empty calories, too much fun weighs you down. It’s counterintuitive, but social media will benefit you professionally if you’re not too… social. Stay focused on why you’re on a particular channel. Refer to your plan. Save the fiddlefarting around for your own private pages.

–    Pull at the same speed. If you are a lot more active on one channel than another, your key users and evangelizers will migrate to where you’re putting in the most effort. If you’re mainly a Facebook kind of person, your users will notice that your Twitter feed is very passive and sporadic. They’ll be passive as well. But worse than just passive, the situation will affect you. The Twitter feed (or whatever) will become something that just saps your energy and divides your focus. Either find a way to get your tweets running at the same pace as your other channels, or unharness your slow horse entirely.

–    Pull in the same direction. Each channel should be reinforcing your others. Don’t post something on the blog without crossposting via your other channels. If you have a contest in one medium, celebrate the winners on the others. If you solve a customer service problem on one, you should… you get the idea.

Giddy-up!