How to Make your Social Media Accounts not suck

Regardless of platform, corporate/company social media accounts generally suck: They are overly proud, boastful, arrogant, and self-centered. They focus on cramming marketing promotions and sales messages down their audience’s throats.

The Problem.

Companies try using social media to reach a target audience and millions of potential customers. Here’s the problem: EVERY COMPANY is doing this exact thing. Small wonder you’re not getting the desired engagement or interaction with your audience.

The Solution:

The one-sentence solution: Create a genuine and personalized social media presence that connects with your audience. Here are the details:

1. Sound Human.

You’re not going to impress any gamer by ideally speaking the Queen’s English or having a jargon-loaded vocabulary. Social Media is a realm of very short attention spans: People want things clear and concise. Forget all the jargon and opt for straightforward language.

2. Skip the Corporate Blah

Customers don’t care about visions and missions and five-year plans. To be brutally honest, most of your employees don’t care about it because no plan survives contact with reality. The content you create has to be relevant to the audience (players), and none of that corporate blah matters to them.

3. Focus on the People that truly Matter.

Focus on the guys behind the scenes doing the work and not running the company. Shine a light on the operations people that don’t usually have a voice: Programmers, Designers, Artists, HR, Marketing, and the lowly copywriter.

The customers already know who the bosses at the top are, and most customers honestly DO NOT care who they are: The boss is not the one getting the product out to the customer.

4. Show that your company cares about its people.

In line with #3 above, share the stories of the company doing right by its people: Let people take leave without feeling bad about it. Share the stories where the team worked overtime to fix a mission-critical problem and then compensated for it correctly.

5. Share how the company makes lives greater.

“Lives greater” are the keywords: Share the candid snaps, the behind-the-scenes video, and clips from the company’s family day or departmental dinner. Share and show the charity efforts for the local orphanage — leave the letters “CSR” out of this.”

In The End,

Social media is about making your company human and relatable. Do this by providing relevant day-to-day, slice-of-life content. You want to show the audience that the company is staffed and run by humans, by everyday people. This is what 80% of your content should be. Use the other 20% on marketing, sales, and promotion.