Social Media Is Rocket Science

Knowing where you want to be isn’t enough

Knowing what you want to achieve with social media is easy; you have a target, you aim at it, and often miss.  Why is this?  Well it’s a lot like rocket science.  If you aim at Mars you’ll miss, because the Earth is moving and so is Mars, which obviously means Mars won’t be in the place you’re aiming at.  And if your rocket doesn’t work there’s no point in aiming at it anyway.

You need specialists

So you’ve picked your target, but what do you need to get there?  First off you need to get a team, you need someone who knows how planetary physics work, and you need an engineer who can build you a rocket.  The first part is easy, Isaac Newton worked it out for you a long time ago.  So you need someone who can use those numbers and turn them into something you can use.  Now you need your engineer who can then put them into a real thing.   You can then load it with whatever you want to get to your target, and get it there at the right time.  Sounds easy in those terms.

Using rocket science for social media

Whoever sets the target, needs to listen to the specialists, because picking targets is easy, hitting them is hard.  To hit your target you need to listen to your specialist who tells you that you’re aiming is off, and the rocket isn’t powerful enough to hit your target.   Social media is a science and an art in one.  You need to understand the limitations and strengths of the medium, and each platform within it.  If you don’t, then your rockets will miss Mars, and any time and money you spend will be wasted.

Good advice doesn't come cheap, only the bad does

Social Media Consultants - Bullshit Advice For A Bullshit Price

Something funny happened today. I saw something on twitter (by which I mean Hootsuite, I'm a professional after all), which for about ten seconds had me worried. This was a post by a 'Social Media Consultant' which made me worried as it could make my life more difficult by giving a few idiots ideas, which would make them a lot of idiots I would have to deal with. So I had a little look at his website, and the first thing I see was a tip about how to attach a photo to a tweet on the twitter main site.

Really? You charge for advice like that?

This made me smile, but what I then read made me laugh, he gave one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever read.  As I'm sure you know, twitter puts caps on how many you can follow, so as soon as you have 2000 followers, you can follow more than 2000 people. You can have as many followers as you like, and only follow zero. Seems fair.

2000 Is Just A Number

Now if you are following 2000 and have 2000 followers, what is the value of your reach? (Reach is how far your tweets and content can go) These 'followers' are people that follow back, who will follow you if the only content you post is nothing, no postings, no content, not even retweets, as all they want is to be able to say "I've got 2000 followers, how many do you have?"  What value is that for building an audience for your business, or even worse, for a charity as he offered his 'Skills and experience' to them. This is a scary thought as for my job and my trade, these are the cowboys, trying to jump on a staitonary 'runaway' wagon, when the horses have broken loose and are nowhere to be seen.

Quality Not Quantity 

It easy to think in the world of twitter that the only thing that matters is how many followers you have, but it's the quality of them that matters. I would rather have ten followers who are journalists than a thousand who hope that I will become their follower in return.  "But you're not trying to sell anything!" I can hear you say. Wrong. I am trying to sell something, it's just that what I'm selling is advice; be safe, it's your life, help us to help you when you need us. You don't have to spend money, you just have to listen. Try selling that message!

Have good content, share it, see what happens, what they like, monitor, assess,  learn and repeat. It's simple really. kinda.

It's business, not personal

Rudeness. How to handle someone who's rude on social media
This is an interesting area as a lot of people seem to think that because they can use any name, no one will know who they are, but it simply isn't true. I know of one case where someone was beyond rude, and not only was he tracked down, he was stupid enough to post personal details which made it easier to confirm who it was. We're not talking about the police or private investigators or some clever IT people here either. It was just a bunch of kids annoyed that a friend had been insulted. Basically its very easy to find them is what I'm saying here.

So, a few people were very rude to me, but also very stupid. I gave them the chance to back down, they didn't want to because they were too committed to the cause, and were made to look stupid(including an MP, and I really enjoyed that).  Well they accepted that, or at least one of them has, and they apologised.  A couple of others have sort of jumped on the band wago while using it to make digs at me. So now I have a decision to make.

Do I accept the apology or not? I do want to accept the first apology, I think it was genuine and deserves respect. The others............ I don't respect them, they can't say it honestly, so I feel reluctant to acknowledge it, but I want us to take the moral high ground.

I think the problem is that although its business, social media is personal. It's not me they hate, or at least not directly, they hate what I represent, in this respect, they hate the idea of change. But the hate is directed at me, and as I represent the 'whole' on social media, the hate is sometimes directed at me alone. I've been hated by people before and you know what, by deal. I don't care about their opinion. There's a saying that's been doing the rounds online for a few weeks and it really is true, 'a tiger isn't concerned with the opinions of sheep'.

So if you are getting hate directed at you, by trolls or whoever, ask yourself this, do you really care? Who is this person to you? Unless it's someone who's opinion you respect, or someone you care about, fuck 'em!

Just don't do it literally, then they'd really hate you.

Good content and bad content

Sometimes my job is strange. Today, something happened that shouldn't have. I posted a picture, a collage of seven vehicles with a little safety message tacked on. It was only posted just for a toy company to have a look at our range of trucks and it became very quickly the most successful posting ever on Facebook. Now what is so strange about it is the trucks weren't doing anything sexy, five of them were parked, sitting there doing nothing.

Now again this is just like an earlier blog below, but more stranger. People have liked us and followed us to see what we say, and in this post,mew said nothing, nothing at all. Or at least nothing we hadn't said many, many times before. Which again leads me to one conclusion. Social media is a very strange type of work.

We are all looking for something that will go viral, but no one can say what will go viral. Anyone who makes a viral video on YouTube that was seen by 5 million people in 1 week would probably admit in the bar, when no one is listening that they have 19 videos with 1000 views between them.  If you build it, they will come only works for baseball fields in the middle of nowhere. Social media is much more hit and miss.

If you look at your followers on twitter, ask yourself how many are friends? If you have several thousand, ask yourself how many you already follow? How many of them look at your links, your photos, or even read your content other than cursory look? Odds are not very many, which is a depressing thought, because if you don't care about what others are posting, do you really think anyone cares about yours?

If you have a lot of followers, say well over a 1000, but only following a few, have a look at your avi. Are you an attractive woman? if so, how many of your followers are women, and how many men are only interested when you post a photo of yourself? If you are happy with that, I'm happy for you.

In case you think that I'm jealous, I'm not, I can get love on hate on my work account, pick up 50 followers a day on it.  My personal account is just for fun, and I barely post on it. I'm more proud that I only personally know a couple of my followers and one I've never met is a very good friend now, so that to me is a success.

Sorry, I seemed to have rambled a bit of topic there, this is meant to be about what you post.

Basically I'm saying, that what you post could be anything, there are no rules to what is good, what people are likely to want to see, just content. There is no such thing as good content, or bad content. To paraphrase William Goldman, the screenwriter when talking about the films The Postman and Titanic, "there is content people want to see and content they don't".

I hope everyone always wants to see your content.

(This was an interesting and very honest blog about working in social media, if you want to know what it's like, have a read.....http://socialmediatoday.com/rachel-strella/1255821/5-tips-avoiding-social-media-burnout)

How to get over a 1100 new followers a month on Twitter.

(From 2500 to over 10300 followers in six under six months with only 756 tweets, including retweets)

There’s a lot written in social media blogs about ‘content’.  And when I say social media blogs, I mean ones written by professionals, those of us who work in social media.  ‘Content’ by the way is what you post, the text, the pictures and videos that you put up on your Facebook and Twitter accounts.  The professionals need to call it content as it makes it sound like a product and to be professional you have to have a product.

Which is why I like what I do. 

As it’s a government account, I’m not trying to sell anything.  I’m also limited in what I can post as it’s mainly used for press reasons, anything else that is posted (content) is just general PR to tell people what we do and make sure they know how to contact us.

So is the ‘Content king’ as they like to say?  Not even slightly.  People do not ‘follow’ or ‘like’ you because you are constantly posting interesting content. 

Why do you friend and unfriend people on your own account?  You want to know what they are saying and you no longer want to know.  The fact that I managed to get so many new followers isn’t anything to do with my creativity in saying the same thing over and over again in different ways.  It’s because people want to know what my organisation is saying because what we say is important to them. 

The same is true if you run a corporate account for a large department store chain or anything where you want to try to sell something.  People follow you because you have something they want, when they no longer want it, they will lose interest.

I’ve read a lot about how much and often content should be posted, but frankly it’s bollocks.  You should only post if you have something to say, and the same goes for your personal account.  I will quite happily unfriend someone who posts a lot of random crap all the time, but the people who don’t post, they become a ghost, someone who is there and I am happy to leave there, as they don’t bother me anymore. 

I’m not afraid of ghosts.

But the ones that put out a ridiculous amount of posts, trying to get new followers and likes, it’s a bit, well, desperate.  It’s like the kid in the playground shouting out “like me, I’m funny!”  They are just another wannabe community radio presenter, a noise in the background no one listens to. 

Maybe it has to be different for them, they have to worry about ROI (return of investment) another word to make it look like content is a product.  They need to somehow make people think that they are generating enough trade to pay their wages. 

And if you talk about annoying TV adverts, then they you talk about the company, so if they annoy you with ‘content’, you’ll talk about it right?

Say what you need to say, when you have to say it, and say it for a reason.