Social Communication starts with Engaging Content

Last week I had a quick conversation on Twitter that started off with one of my random brain droppings… But the 3 sentence conversation really made me think about what is needed to be successful in social media. The tweets go like this:

Me: What does “social media” mean anymore… Isn’t it just simply using technology to communicate?

@vabike: Bike advocates’ problem isn’t web and social media skills, it’s laziness & lack of inclination to communicate

Me: @vabike I would imagine a lot of communities are like that. Then it comes down to relevant content to spark the interest to communicate.

I wanted to call out the response from @vabike… It’s not the skills but the laziness and lack of inclination to communicate. Simply tweeting or posting a Facebook message doesn’t equal communication or conversation. So the question becomes, what would give consumers, (in this case, bike advocates) the inclination to communicate with what your brand is saying online? The short answer… Relevant and entertaining content.

Insights

Scanning the interwebs for information and conversation is a crucial first step in creating this elusive relevant and entertaining content. Understanding what is being said, where its being said, who’s saying it, and how it’s said will give you context as to what is relevant to your consumer base as well as the channels used. Continually managing and monitoring the ecosystem will give you a real time updates on the sentiment shifts in the market.

Test

Knowing what information is important, relevant, exciting, educating, and entertaining for your consumer base will give you the knowledge to create engaging content and entertaining interactions. To further define the engagement level of content, we need to test messaging and content strategies, monitor the engagement, and track what happens. Getting a global view of the engagement levels of differing content provides concrete information in how to engage online and how to give your consumers inclination to communicate back.

Adapt

As with anything you monitor, test, and track we need to have the ability to adapt. The world in social media is in such an infancy stage, growing at the pace of nothing we’ve ever seen, so we have to adapt to whatever this behemoth turns into. We have to be nimble to market values and sentiments. We have to continually monitor our ecosystem and account for changes as well as our strategies.

In social media, content is king. With the amount of information available to our consumers, we have the task given to us to, not only differentiate in our product/service offerings, but also differentiate in what content we deliver, how we deliver it, and how we interact with consumers once they engage. Following the aforementioned steps will give you the foundation for success in this crazy social world.

Photo courtesy of Flickr – neonihil