Growing Your Social Media Presence

While still young and often misunderstood, social media has quickly grown to become a very valuable (some would say necessary) tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Most groups we work with are anxious to “leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter, etc.”

However, I’ve found that many groups have a very shallow understanding of these tools–mostly name recognition from an article proclaiming the miraculous power of social media and demanding all business get involved right now!

I think that many businesses (and individuals for that matter) can benefit from joining conversations online, but I always encourage learning about the options and ways to most effectively utilize the tools before simply diving right in. Perhaps more importantly, you need to understand how much work will be involved in maintaining your presence.

Gardening Metaphor

In addition to common sense, I’ve found that a gardening metaphor can be useful in helping to understand the requirements of a successful social media campaign.  In a recent blog post, David Armano provided a very easy to remember and understand version of the gardening metaphor. He breaks it down into three parts:

• Seeding
• Feeding
• Weeding

To add my own explanation to his memorable framework…

Seeding involves

• Identifying your goals and the best tools for the job – choosing your plant varieties
• Setting up accounts and creating initial content – planting the seeds
• Beginning to engage others in the conversation – root stimulator

Feeding involves

• Creating content that provides value to your prospective readers – watering your plants

Weeding involves

• Monitoring your efforts, and removing those that seem detrimental to the health of your campaign – weeding and pruning your plants

Of course, no gardening metaphor would be complete without identifying the fruits of your labor! As in gardening, the payoff can be truly rewarding.  Cultivating loyal followers who find value in your offerings can easily be translated into improvements to your bottom line, by establishing your expertise in a field you may realize that opportunities find you rather than you needing to seek them out, and perhaps most importantly, you may find that the effort you put in is multiplied through the natural process of growth!