Social Media

Likes on Facebook, Loves on Instagram, and who actually Tweets anyway?

Turns out, this stuff is way more important than we though, and way less important than we have been lead to believe.

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter

Google+

Pinterest

Here’s the lowdown, social media is–to the average person–a place they can go to have fun. They want to see what their nieces are up to and pictures of some awesome mountain they wish they could go to or some new way to remodel their kitchen. They’re not there for your product.

Unless your product tells an awesome story. To create an awesome story, well, you have to move out of the mindframe of “I want to promote myself on [insert social network]” and actually become a storyteller.

Consider these two potential Facebook posts:

This week only, 50% off all furniture in our online store!
Maybe that’s accompanied by a photo of a chair you sell and a link to your site’s store page.

This Family Lives in a Treehouse, Check Out the Kids’ Room!
This post has a picture of said treehouse and a link to a story you tell about it.

Which one is an ad and which is a story? Which one are people more likely to click on?

“But I’m not selling treehouses.” Of course, you’re not. The thing is, we’re inundated with ads all day long. Billboards, the radio, television, and certainly the web…including social media.

If you want to stand out above all of the noise, you’ve got to be interesting.

“How can I make my business interesting?” you might ask. Well, hopefully you’ve thought about this before, but here are a few ideas of how to take your ad and turn it into a story.

If you’re a mechanic shop, appeal to racing fans, or people who love exotic or vintage cars. Get a blog going and post once a week about this type of stuff. Use lots of pictures, a little text, and then just slip your offer in while they’re enthralled.

If you’re a restaurant, a barber shop, or any other service that people want, need and love to go to, show off your product, for sure! But don’t say, “Come eat at Larry’s!” Instead, just show photos of people loving what you have to offer. They’ll get the picture and Larry will need to hire his brother Larry and his other brother Larry, too, just to keep up with the growth.

I don’t claim to be an expert on telling your story, but what I can do is make it as easy as possible for you to tell that story by getting your social presence streamlined, helping you focus on only the social networks that are going to work for you, and that you can keep up with, and making sure your site kills it when it comes to integrating with those networks.