Question 8 from 10 Essential Question for your Social Media Marketing Campaign: “How personal does the SOCIAL part need to be?” is one of those “It depends” kind of questions.
While delivering a seminar on Facebook not long ago, one of the attendees remarked “But what if I don’t want to connect with people from my high school? There’s a reason I don’t live there anymore.” That made me stop because until then I’d been a proponent of “laying it all out there.”
The easy answer to the question is it can be as personal (or impersonal) as you want it to be. Here are my tips for determining how personal you should be:
- It’s called SOCIAL media marketing so you should share some personal information
- Go ahead and post your birth DAY but not your BIRTH DATE – why make it easy for identity thieves?
- Post negative comments with extreme caution – they can come back to bite you if you’re not careful
- Tell us about your family in the same way you’d share with someone at a networking event
- Keep your marketing goals in mind lest you find yourself adrift in social cyberspace
- I aim for around 30% personal and the rest focused on business but that shifts from Facebook (much more personal) to Twitter and LinkedIn.
- At the risk of repeating myself, establish a goal and stick to it. Post it on your monitor so you stay focused and don’t end up with 100% social and 0% marketing.
- Be creative. Look for ways that your social life mixes with your business goals so that while posting personal information, you’re also drawing attention to your business or business goals.