Without a Solid Foundation, Your Social House Will Fall

[Tweet “If you want your social house to stand the test of time, a strong foundation is essential!”]You may be a business who is thinking about getting started with social media or you might be an individual who is doing the same. Regardless, based on my own experience, it can all be pretty overwhelming at first glance. It doesn’t have to be that way. Sure, once you get started you can explore social media’s more advanced functionalities but, right now, you just need to get going and these 1,500 words will, hopefully, be helpful as you begin that journey.

Every new endeavor starts with building a solid foundation. I see many many people, and businesses, who will jump into social media prior to completing even the most basic of those things that are essential to maximizing their success. They rapidly construct their social homes only to find them crumble in a heap upon their porous footings. This results in lost time and effort, not to mention botched or squandered opportunities, that can never be recovered. Occasionally the tortoise does win the race.

For those who might scoff at these suggestions as being soooo basic, I might remind all of us (yes, including me) that there is a huge difference between knowing and doing as is evidenced by the last time we walked out of a meeting and said to ourselves … “Damn! Why didn’t I do ….!?”

Define your goals

Before you even get started, it is critical that you define your goals as these will dictate your actions. Important areas for you to consider would include

Why do you want to do this?
Who do you want to reach?
Where are your customers active on social media?
How will you approach this?
When do you plan on getting started?

Your answers to these questions will be absolutely instrumental in guiding your next moves. For example, if all of your customers are found on Facebook, and your product or service is very much consumer oriented, do you want to invest your efforts in a kicking Facebook page or on a LinkedIn presence?

Choose your network(s)

Based on your goals, you will be selecting one or more networks to become active on. A very good source for helping you to determine some additional, and important, considerations would be the CMO’s Guide to the 2014 Social Landscape.

It is very important for you to remember that you do not have to be active on every social network in order to be successful. Conversely, attempting to do so would be more akin to committing social suicide or death by social. You may have heard of social media’s black hole which sucks the time out of your day. Attempting to be overly active, particularly where not needed, is a sure fire way to find it! As previously discussed … wherever your customers can be found, so go you. Wherever they are non-existent, neither do you exist.

Etiquette

Your first question may be … “What should I be talking about?” Much of this will depend on the network itself. As a rule, Facebook is very personal, LinkedIn is for business, and Twitter is approved for just about anything. Google+ continues to evolve but, IMHO, it has maintained an early adopter and tech personality. If your followers (friends, connections) are leaving you in droves, or you are receiving little to no invitations to connect, you might take this as a sign that your messaging needs to change.

Ultimately, from a business standpoint, while it is okay to promote your product or service, the bulk of your efforts in this regard should be devoted to educating your target market about your industry in general. In this way, you are proving a free service and, at the same time, you are demonstrating your expertise in your industry. As in real life, promoting others before blowing your own horn, is highly recommended. What they say about givers get is very much true!

There is some discussion about whether or not basic manners are needed let alone even recommended (too many niceties taking up valuable space and thereby creating noise in news streams). As someone who was raised during an earlier time, I would default to the liberal use of please and thank you. While seemingly no longer widely in use, they are real words. I know this to be true as I looked them up. My best assessment is that those who do not recognize the need for good manners are the same people who constantly fiddle with their cell phones during our business meetings. “It’s not bad manners. It’s multi-tasking!” Yeah, right.

Housekeeping

You only get that one chance to make that good first impression. Because of this, it is absolutely critical that your personal profiles and/or company pages are professional and complete before you even think about venturing out into that network in any way, shape, or form. If you were to send a connection request to someone on LinkedIn, and let’s say that this is potentially a million dollar customer, and they don’t accept because you sent a template invitation and your profile looks like it belongs to a two-year old … you don’t get a second chance. You’re done. You will not be able to send that individual another invitation. Ouch!

If you are not sure about how and where to start, two words … Google and Emulate. There are literally thousands of great articles and resources on the web that can easily be found via a simple Google search. One of my favorite sources is HubSpot which offers an extensive library of free eBooks for just about anything related to social media marketing. If you know people or companies that seem to be successful at implementing their plans, visit their profiles and pages, take notes, and then emulate that which you find.

Connecting

Why and when you choose to extend an invitation to connect, or accept from an invitation to connect, is a very personal decision that I cannot make for you. If your product or service has mass appeal, you may want to connect with as many people as possible in order to maximize your reach. On the other hand, if you sell a very high ticket item that is only for a specific industry, you may wish to be more discriminating. Starting out, there is a natural inclination to just connect. My advice is to curb your initial enthusiasm and think about your goals prior to proceeding.

Keep in mind that when you connect with someone (and this will vary by network) certain privileges are generally exchanged. Regardless of the network, what this person shares is going to appear in your news feed (unless you block or hide them) and, the more people you are connected to, the more active your feed becomes. This can mean “noise” (stuff that you don’t care about or that you don’t want to see). Think of noise as music. I lean heavily toward classic rock. If I had to spend my day listening to pop, rap, hip hop, techno, country and western, or God forbid, disco … I would rather step into a tub of warm water and then slit my wrists.

Aside from being a discriminating connector, other suggestions would include …

Use the network’s search functionality to target your connections.
Make use of lists (Twitter and Facebook), tags (LinkedIn), and circles (Google+) to organize your connections.
Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, or communities on Google+, are the best places to rub elbows and to engage with your target markets.

Engaging

You can sit on the sidelines and watch the social parade go by or you can choose to participate in the action. One thing is for sure. If you do not engage with others (converse), you will not attract, create, or build relationships that will lead to increased revenues. This is not only a given, it’s a guarantee. Once again, this is entirely your call. If you do choose to become a part of your social community, follow these simple rules …

Listen first and learn.
If you have something of value to contribute, do so. If not …
Start slowly with taps (likes, mentions, retweets) and then move to touches (comments).
If you have something of value to share, or a great topic for discussion, do so!
Take the time to build relationships slowly. Nothing creeps people out more than you asking them to marry you prior to your first date.

Taking the time to properly pour your foundation, and then to practice solid construction principles in creating your initial framework and then your subsequent building phases, will certainly deliver to you a much more finished, and stable, structure. Having to go back after the fact and tear down the drywall because you forgot to put in the electrical and plumbing, really sucks. I should know since I myself have done so more than once and, believe me, it’s not much fun.

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM’s Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services

Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!