If you’re the type of person who is passionate about social media and online marketing trends, habitually reading blogs like ChrisBrogan.com or Social Media Explorer, it’s easy to fall into a vicious trap: You assume that everyone else has the same in-depth knowledge of online marketing best practices as you. The reality is that while social media have become popular tools for sharing information, photos or videos, not everyone (even some marketing executives) yet fully understands the unwritten rules for engaging audiences online.

This reality became clear to me during a recent conversation I had with a friend planning to launch social media accounts on behalf of his company. As he discussed his launch plan he said, “We intend to use Twitter for PR and Facebook will host the content our customers want to see.”

While his intentions were good, I was concerned about his approach to social media. I asked him to clarify what he meant by using Twitter for PR. He explained that he would use the Twitter account to distribute messages to his audience. Facebook, on the other hand, would be the company’s venue for posting images and videos.

To use sites like Twitter and Facebook to push messages or merely host content is to miss the point of social media and to ignore what makes these tools powerful. My friend is a sharp business person and a great marketer, but the mistake he made was to apply traditional marketing practices to social media.

Social media sites are built for dialogue and we as marketers don’t get to decide what site will be for PR, what site will be used to host images, what site will be used for customer service, and so on. Each offers a blend of all of these things and if we choose to launch branded social media sites, we should expect that people among our audience will engage with us on many levels. When they do, some of them will have product questions, some will need customer support and others will offer feedback about our company. If we ignore these people in favor of marketing monologues, we risk irritating those who might otherwise be brand loyalists. Those companies that do not embrace the social part of social media, not only miss the point, they miss opportunities to build strong relationships with their customers.

In the end my advice to my friend was to use both Twitter and Facebook to not only share and distribute compelling content, but more importantly, to actively encourage a dialogue with his audience.

Photo Credit: LarimdaME

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