Put the social in social media

I’ve been writing a social media plan this week and one thing that I really try not to lose in writing these plans are the people.

I have no idea who will be executing this plan, who will be impacted by it and even who gets to approve it. What I do know is that they are all people. And people want to be treated as such.

Throwing information at people on social media will not cut it. One thing that you learn in many relationship-oriented communication classes is that people value interactions most when they get to talk about themselves. So how does this work for social media?

You can promote yourself as much as you want, but where I feel the best interaction happens is when you get people talking. When I was interning for Humane Ohio, the thing that I am most proud of doing with their Facebook page was asking people to post a picture of their pets. We had an amazing response, people were posting pictures of their pets and commenting on other pictures. We even chimed in and commented on the photos bringing a sense of community to the page. Once people were on the page, they became engaged with other things we had posted.

One tip for Twitter that I’ve seen from many sources is to humanize the Twitter. There’s a person behind your brand tweeting, let your followers know who he or she is. Don’t be the man behind the curtain, be the communicator.

How frequently do your tweets or status updates end with a question mark? Or blog posts even?