Question:

We have an Aardvark Safaris Facebook page and I like to mix stories of the following type:
- wildlife
- cultural
- beach
- lodge
- etc

Yours, Richard

Answer:

Hi Richard,

Good to hear from you again.

You’re absolutely correct in believing that people want to see who they’re dealing with and chatty status updates and staff comments can offer a more personable side to your business.

However, when it comes to social media, as part of your online marketing solutions and strategy, I would suggest that you are possibly asking the wrong questions.

Essentially you’re asking what you should talk about, when the real question should be “what would your customers like to talk about?”

Social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums, etc) are often seen as another way or another place for companies to talk, in the hope that customers might listen.  If you think about it, that is not really what social media is about – and this is where I think many still do not really understand the real principles and power of a “social” approach.  This is not another platform for you to talk about yourself, to tell people about your latest offers or even to tell people about your staff’s “tea and coffee comments”.  I am not saying that you can’t ever do that (on the contrary) but this is not the basis of community building.

It is all about looking for what your clients are passionate about and giving them an opportunity and a platform to develop their community where they can engage their passions and talk amongst themselves.  You may be surprised to hear that when we manage Facebook communities for our clients, we do not to respond to their comments or questions for at least 24 hours - and there’s a very good reason for this. If we were to respond immediately to every question posted on a Facebook wall, it would kill the community conversation and chat.  By “ignoring” comments and questions, we’re giving other customers a chance to answer and help each other, which creates a bond and builds community. 

So, I think that the real question should be:  What do you customers want to talk about, what is their passion and why they like would to join the community that you could set up and support for them.  It’s all about them, not you.  How you create this community should be your main priority. People love to talk about and get involved in their passions and if you let your community naturally build itself around their passions (with a bit of engineering to get the conversation going) then you’ll soon find that, like a good dinner host, with a few starter lines and questions, the conversation will take over by itself.

We often find that if we build the passion community first (sometimes using old fashion technology such as phones and emails), only then will we consider which platform we should employ in order to portray it online and enable others to participate – which will then enable you to fully exploit the marketing objectives of social media more effectively for your business.

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