I have a confession to make, I’m not the most social person in the world. In fact, I’m not social at all. If left to my own devices, I’d rather read a book. I’d rather hang out at a pond and check out the surface of the water and just chill.
That’s just the kind of person I am. But as you probably already know, that kind of personality doesn’t do all that well when it comes to the world of social media marketing.
The good news about social media marketing is that you don’t have to be an extrovert. That’s right. You don’t have to be the center of attention. You don’t have to be the life of the party. You don’t have to be any of that.
To do well in social media marketing, you just need to use the right tools and you just need to have the right templates.
I don’t know about you, but I hate writing emails. Emails really take a lot of energy out of me because you have to answer what somebody’s going to ask. You have to go through pleasantries and there’s this whole ritualized dance. And to be honest, I just don’t have the time or inclination for that kind of thing.
This is where templates come in. Once I see that this person wants to be greeted a certain way or wants to be interacted a certain way, then I have a template for that. So what I do is I just sit down and come up with all sorts of alternative scenarios requiring different types of templates.
So I write down the template once and then enter them into Google ChromeGoogle Chrome and use a hot key system. So once I get a certain email that requires a certain type of response, I go through my hot keys, press the hot key or enter the keyword shortcut and out comes the template.
I would itemize it by adding a name and some additional details and my social media marketing is done. Sounds pretty awesome, right? It’s definitely drama free. There’s less effort involved. The best part is since I did it all ahead of time, I gave myself enough time to focus on the kind of experience the reader is going to get when they read my materials.
This is crucial. A lot of people are under the impression that social media marketing is completely different from email. Absolutely wrong. Whenever you’re doing any kind of outreach and you want to communicate with another person, you are doing both.
So your outreach, as part of your social media marketing campaign, must conform to the best practices of email marketing. This is where people drop the ball. In fact, most people doing this type of marketing are completely clueless to this.
That’s why they’re not as successful as they should be. So here are some tips on how to do social media marketing right even if you’re a total introvert like me.
Be prepared
I’ve already told you about this tip. Basically, you just need to have templates. But by being prepared, you not only need to know what to say when somebody reaches out to you. You also have to be flexible enough so you can tweak your template to produce the very best effect.
I can’t emphasize this enough. A lot of people are under the impression that you just need to improve your Twitter profile and Facebook page and then feed templates to people. Well, let me tell you, if you receive and it’s obvious to you that it’s just a canned message, how would you feel?
Would you feel special? Would you feel like there’s anything special or unique about you? Of course not! You would feel disregarded. You would feel like you don’t matter. In fact, if you’re like most normal people, you would feel disrespected.
How do you expect the other person to feel otherwise? So treat them with the respect they need by being prepared to tweak your template so it delivers that extra nice, special, personal touch. This way, your message can stand out and you can make more money with that engagement.
Engage through your interest
Let me tell you, when it comes to personal engagement with people you don’t know, they will always appreciate it when it’s obvious you care. I’m not talking about caring in the same matter as mother Teresa. I’m not talking about caring in terms of the compassion of the Buddha.
I’m talking about caring in terms of knowing enough about them and what’s important to them and talking the talk. In other words, you’re credible because it seems that you are talking about the same things that are important to them.
This means that, at the very least, you’re not an enemy. You’re not some sort of person that’s just out to rip them off. You are in the ballpark, as far as they’re concerned.
Now, being in the ballpark, as you probably already know, is not enough for you to seal the deal. This is crucial to social media marketing. For example, if you approach somebody about IT topics and you talk about your Perth managed IT services company, they would see that you’re in the ballpark.
You’re not this complete random spammer. So at least they have half a mind to pay close attention to you. They’re not completely serious. They don’t quite know what to make of your brand because they don’t have enough information. But at least you’re in the ballpark.
Once you do that, you then engage with what they’re talking about. This is where caring comes in. You have to understand there are a lot of experts out there. There are a lot of very smart people who know how to do certain things that people pay money for.
That’s not the problem because those people are a dime a dozen. Instead, you have to focus your mind on the question of why should your prospects want to do business with you. What is it about your expertise? Say you sell commercial shelving systemscommercial shelving systems – what about these products are better than your competitors? You need to explain this well.
Well, here’s the problem. Chances are your expertise are probably at a lower level than your competition. I don’t say that to be mean. I just say that to be realistic. So, what makes you different?
That is where showing how you care and showing how you’re credible could make all the difference in the world because while it’s true that they can go to more credible and more authoritative people, usually, those people are harder to get a hold of, but easy to find. They’re also more expensive.
So when you make the case that you actually care enough so you bend over backwards based on what they’re concerned of or by giving them freebies or free advice, they’re more likely to pay attention to you.
This is one crucial element of social media marketing that a lot of social media marketers are completely blind to. Maybe blind is a too strong of a word. Maybe they’re aware of it but they just don’t want to deal with it because they think that it will take a tremendous amount of time and effort.
Well here’s the thing. If you target the right prospects, every second that you invest in them will translate into a bigger paycheck down the road. It’s all a matter of putting in the work now so you can collect on a big payday later on.
That’s the long and short of modern social media marketing.