The more I delve into the world of social media and leveraging it to tell the story for businesses, government agencies and non-profits the more I learn about how it is not a stand alone effort.  Social media needs to be part of a strategic effort to communicate your story and key to that is not forgetting to market in "the real world".  Consistently I am seeing organizations scratching their heads after they roll out channels with great fanfare and engaging content yet no one shows up.  Unlike mythical baseball fields, just building it won't make them come in social media.

 

Here are some common sense simple tips to take your efforts beyond the dream of viral connections and get more attention for your efforts:

 

1.  Ensure your name is consistent.  As you set up your channels make every effort to secure a consistent naming convention across every site.  It will make it thousands of times easier to find your outlets when the name is the same across all of them and real gold is struck when it also matches your main website URL.  Its not always easy to do this when you are picking up a campaign after everything has been established but where possible consistency is best.

 

2.  Publish the site addresses in every thing you put out.   Social media needs to be part of a convergent multi-platform communications strategy.  To accomplish that goal ensure you push the various channels and their individual addresses in all of your marketing materials and publications including print ads, magazines, company brochures, email signature blocks, business cards, post cards and, of course, links prominently displayed on your main web page to name just a few.

 

3. Shout out loud.  Many military bases, businesses and non-profits have billboards and marquees located at key locations.  Be sure to add your social networking addresses there and invite people to follow you.  I knew it was a new day when one of the smallest little churches near our house in rural Virginia asked us for weeks "Do you tweet?  Join us at...."  Old school religion meets new school marketing.

 

4.  Just ask.  When I took a class in political campaigning I learned one of the biggest mistakes many politicians make is failing to ask for peoples votes.  Human psychology leads us to be more likely to do something when we are asked nicely to do it.  Social media is no different.  Ask people to follow you.  Ask them to invite their friends to follow you.  Ask them to comment on your stories and re-tweet your updates.  Ask them to post their pictures and videos.  Study after study is showing that when you ask people to do something the results are exponentially better.  (Oh, but as the picture shows, make sure you spell things right. Photo courtesy of dailydesigndiscoveries.com)

 

None of these ideas will guarantee hundreds of fans and followers.  Engaging content, understanding of the etiquette of the net and good business practices are still the solid foundation of building successful social media efforts but all of those are moot if no one even knows you have channels out there.  One of the lessons of successful social media marketing is doing actual marketing of your social media.