Shrill – Social Media Marketing for the Rest of Us

I have this conversation quite often:

Small businesses asking me if they should open Social Media profiles in their names or the company’s.

Here’s my take on this: in most cases, people buy from people. Social Media is about people,  so Social Media Marketing should be too.

The Social Media crowd is not very fond of companies without a “face” and “faces” without a little bit of humanity. Understandably so. Spammers are out there creating mass profiles and flooding social gathering sites like Twitter with sales pitches, phishing scams, phony links, mass “follow” apps, and spam bots and taking the fun out of Social Media just like they almost ruined email, before email clients developed smarter filters.

Social Media platforms are coming up with good filters too, but ultimately the users are the ones calling the shots and manually deciding who they want to listen to. That is the beauty of Social Media.

The huge problem with many  marketers is that they have a hard time understanding that marketing in this environment is  a 100% opt-in. Meaning, they will only listen to you if they so chose. They have the power to block you completely of they don’t like what you have to say and, to make matters a tad more complicated, it is no longer a one-sided deal. You talk to them, you can bet they will talk back to you… and about you!

You say “look at me”, and they say “why should we?” and you better have a very good answer to that.

That said, it is easy to understand why people are more open to other people than they are to business profiles in Social Media sites. A business is an “entity” trying to sell them something. A solicitor. Someone who is only there to make a buck. A professional, on the other hand, is a human being, tied to a business.

However, it will all definitely boil down to how you conduct yourself out there. Having a personal profile and acting like an obnoxious spam bot, talking only about your company, product, service and website will lead you nowhere.

So my answer is: open personal profiles and act like a human being. Talk about you business but also about things that interest you and your audience. If you want to list the business only, look for Business Directories and Local Search Sites like Merchant Circle and Insider pages, which also have business related Social Media features.

Open a Facebook Fan page for your business and a Company Group on LinkedIn and brag all you want about your business there.