Social Media for Business:
Three Reasons Social Media Isn’t Social
Over the last couple of years I have observed what I consider to be a serious trend toward a lack of social engagement on business social media platforms. It appears that businesses are spending all of their time posting links to posts, advertising their products and services and generally ignoring much of the other postings that appear. What has caused this change from interaction to a bulletin board appearance?
- Lack of understanding about social media: It appears that many businesses see social media as simply new form to augment their traditional advertising through themarketingheaven.com. Just as they would purchase a magazine ad, highway billboard or television ad, they simply see social media as another place to post their ads. Since they have no previous history of interaction with customers that see their ads, they have no real idea of how to do so with social media.
- Lack of time for social media: Many businesses have not hired a trained individual or provided necessary training for one of their staff members to handle their social media presence. Too often this role is simply added to an existing employee’s already busy day. Rather than do the necessary research for effective social media they simply use it as another place to do some free advertising.
- Too self-centered for social media: This last item is probable the most egregious problem. I have observed that a great number of people posting on business social media rarely, if ever, engage with their followers. They are so busy posting their own ideas or reposting other’s ideas with a goal of having others share, comment, retweet, like, etc. With the large number of businesses posting throughout the day, it is difficult to follow all of them and rather than attempting to engage, they simply post.
It is time for social media to get back to being truly social which means that we engage with our readers. I would appreciate your comments on what you think has happened to social media and how we can get it back to being social and still help to achieve our goals !