While making a proposal to a community organization a few months ago, I was asked a question that will likely stay with me for years and is the driving force behind this post.
“Anyone can post on Facebook and Twitter. Why do we need to pay you to do it?”
The answer comes in one word. Strategy.
While it is true that anyone can post, few will find successful without careful planning and a well defined strategy. In fact, without a plan, social media marketing could actually hurt your business or organization.
One of the best aspects of SMM is that it is free and wide reaching. This however is also its downfall. Often posts are made with little thought of how far the message will travel and how freely it may be shared.
On your Facebook page, you have some control over the context. Take for example a series of posts from an animal welfare group about a recent large-scale rescue effort. The first post probably has a quite of a bit of background information about the effort.
The subsequent posts are where there could be trouble. An innocent update about the welfare of an animal, when “shared” by a reader could reach someone completely unaware of important information in that first post. Without that information, a comment such as “After hundreds of hours of staff labor, 15 animals were euthanized.”
With the background information of the first post, the comment is an update about the rescue effort and how the poor condition of the animals could not be overcome. To someone unaware of the background story, animals were killed. Unfortunately if someone saw this who is unfamiliar with the organization, they could get a very negative first impression of an organization that is actually trying to help animals.
This of course is an isolated example, but illustrated my point. Your social media message should be carefully crafted to enhance your image, not ruin it.
