Developing a Social Media Mindset

27 Sep 2016
Alan Martin

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Let me ask you, are you getting the results that you expected from your social media marketing?

If not, it could be that you haven’t adopted a social media mindset. If you don’t understand these fundamentals, you are likely to be wasting a lot of time and not having much to show for it.

This social media stuff will move the needle for your business but like anything, knowing and doing are two different things! I want you to make a commitment to yourself now that you are going to try these ideas out to see what happens.

 

 

Mindset

In this article I’m going to be sharing three powerful mindset shifts with you, which are essential for creating a successful business using social media.

  • Chain Links
  • Value First
  • Relationships over Numbers

Chain Links

One of the most common reasons businesses are not achieving success with their social media is because they are using the wrong tools for the wrong job! Have you ever tried eating soup with a fork? Neither have I but I imagine it would not be very effective. Sure you would get a very slight taste of the soup in your mouth, but not enough to fill your stomach. This is exactly how many businesses run their social media marketing.

Let me explain! Social media is NOT the best way to close sales, acquire new customers etc because social media connections are ‘weak links’ and updates on social media platforms have limited visibility, it is simply an effective way to move people to a more suitable place for achieving these goals once the relationship has been built over time. Social media is simply a link in the chain, not the entire chain. Companies that don’t get this concept spend their time broadcasting sales messages across as many platforms as they can, and wonder why the sales are not coming in as they hoped. The clue is in the name!!

Social media is excellent for establishing ‘know’, ‘like’ and ‘trust’ with your audience, which is essential before anyone can do business with you, but this takes time to achieve through frequent exposure to social media updates. Posting regularly helps people ‘know’ that you exist and what you do. Sharing some of yourself and your personality increases your ‘likability’ and sharing your knowledge and experience over time builds ‘trust’.

Beyond this though, how do we get sales and leads? Well, I’m glad you asked that! The next step very much depends on your business and your objectives, but you need to take people to another destination off of social media. Remember, social media is not where you will likely close the business, it is a means to an end! That other destination could be your email list (where your email marketing programme takes over where social media left off), or if you are in the Business to Business space (B2B) it could be arranging a face-to-face meeting with a potential client or referral partner that you connected with on LinkedIn.

Value First

Whatever platform you are using, you need to think, ‘Value First’ at all times! In fact, if you really want to incorporate this mindset shift into your business, you should write this on a sticky note and attach it to your computer so you will see it all the time.

We all need to eat right? That means sooner or later we are going to have to ask for the sale and that’s okay, people don’t mind the occasional sales message provided you have given them enough upfront value before you ask for anything in return.

Relationships over Numbers

No matter how often I tell people that ‘likes’ don’t put money in their bank account, they still want to know how to grow their fan base. “If only I could get to 2,000 Facebook fans or build an email list of 5,000 people, I’d be sorted” I hear them say. Wrong!

Obviously the larger your audience is the more chance your potential customers will be in there somewhere, but what is waaay more important than audience size, is the relationship that you have with your audience. This is why I removed about 200 people from my email list last week (that’s a story for another day).

While measuring audience size is easy to do and keep a track of, this is a vanity metric and not an indication of how successful your marketing is. Far more important is the engagement you are getting, as this is a measure of the relationship that you have with your audience, and relationships are everything!

You can easily see engagement metrics within your Insights tab on Facebook, you can measure retweets, favourites, replies etc on Twitter, you can measure email click-through rates etc etc. You get the idea! Each platform you use will have some way of measuring engagement and that is what you should be paying attention to, over the total numbers.

Conclusion

Get these three fundamental mindset shifts right and you will be well on your way to developing a successful social media strategy, but get them wrong and you will constantly struggle to get the results that you want.

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