If you are like me, the goal of social media is not to advertise your junk that you have, whether your blog, your church service, or whatever else. The best marketing for that is via word-of-mouth. I’d rather have someone endorse my stuff and recommend me than me trying to peddle my wares.
I bring this aup because social media feels like that place where you inherently decide if you want to be a salesman or develop relationships. For some websites like Google+ or Instagram, it’s easy to pick being about relationships. Instagram does not allow links in your posts, so you can’t easily generate click-throughs. Google+ will actually mark you as a spammer if you post identical or nearly identical content.
Twitter though, that’s a hot mess.
In the last three months, I have found myself quickly and fully moving away from Twitter because of the firehose of content that is being put on there. People say they want to develop a relationship, but much of the time it’s in an effort to get you to support them. I even received a DM from someone that said they love watching my Let’s Plays and three minutes into the conversation they were pitching their product to me.
In fact, our current social media strategy for ChurchMag is to focus exclusively on Facebook. We have a lot of growing to do with it, but we have never developed a lot of click-throughs from Twitter. One post that has 1/10th the reach on Facebook has 100’s more people that want to see our content than Twitter. In fact, it’s typically fourth on our list of inbound traffic from social media, behind Pinterest, Facebook, and StumbleUpon (yeah, even that dead platform is kicking their butt).
This makes me think that unless Twitter pivots soon, even those that are power users are going to find a new platform. That’s not even including the issue that the Twitter board of directors are hoping to sell the company to get a return on investment for the stocks, the significant hemorrhaging of money and serious leadership concerns. My guess is Twitter will not be what we’ve know for the past five years in two years. And I’d rather not have to make a special strategy for a niche platform that has character-limiting tweets when I can craft much better content elsewhere.
So our strategy, for now, is to move beyond a 140 character limit and instead take advantage of developing relationships. Tom and Matt are running the show for our social media strategies, so I love seeing them do amazing stuff.
I’d love to start a discussion shooting off social media strategies you have.
Speak your mind...