Don't Shake the Hook

I have the great fortune and honor of working with a wide range of businesses and organizations. This privilege provides me with direct access to the great and not so great uses for social media and Web 2.0.  This posting is going to focus on engaging your audience and not wasting the social capital you have cultivated.

What caused me to think about this as subject matter?  A non-profit I volunteer with has a Facebook page. They created a secondary page for an event. They are now promoting the secondary page to the audience of the primary page with posts like:

Like our page XXX to stay up to date on RxxxTxxHxxxxx.  (RTH is a one-time event).

What??? Why would they do this?  I asked... and received no real answer.  Why would someone that is already following them be asked to follow a separate page competing for space on their newsfeed? Why would the pull people from their main page to a one-time event page?

It seems they have many people, volunteers and paid employees that have admin access.  This creates issues such as posts competing for audience attention, posts that lack consistency and overall planning and posts that simple are not worth posting because they do not follow any best practices or lack relevant information.

Wow.... No wonder their overall page and individual posts appears to engage very little of their audience.

Think about yourself for a moment. You find a product or service you like. You check them out online. Might be a blog, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest page, or maybe Google+.  Doesn't so much matter. What does matter is your found something that you identify with and "like", "follow" or "add". Whatever the correct action is for the particular page.  You start receiving content and engage with the brand.  The odds of you buying that product or service in the future is now sky-high. (much has been written on buying habits of fans so I won't go into that here.)


What if that brand, product or service suddenly changed their messaging, frequency or quite simply started putting out posts that didn't interest / engage you? Would your impression change?  Would it change for the better or worse?  Overall your feeling for the brand would change in a negative way and with it possibly any future purchasing decisions might not "automatically" be for that brand.

• Stay consistent without becoming stale
• Don't confusing your fan
• Be original
• Don't post long rambling posts or posts of irrelevant subject matter
• and don't post with several distinctly different "voices"

If you find yourself turning off your fans you run the risk of losing them as customers. Chances are your competitors are more than happy to fill the void both in terms of social content which ultimately could turn into sales revenue and subsequent brand loyalty.