Successful Social Media Behavior
I met with Justin Kistner of Webtrends for lunch and we got into some interesting discussions about social media, etiquette, and behavior. He made a really good point that etiquette is based around social norms and conventions, but behavior isn’t always based on those norms and can sometimes make a person stand out. There’s certainly some truth to that observation. The question that comes up however, is how do you make sure your social media behavior is successful, where even if it violates the norms, it interests people enough to overlook that violation and/or even shift the norms to that behavior?
I’m thinking here about the occasional game or contest that is used by a company or celebrity. Sometimes this social media behavior is successful, especially if not done in excess and other times, when it is taken too far it becomes annoying to people and the backlash ends up making the behavior unsuccessful.
As a business plans its social media campaigns what needs to be kept in mind is that whatever is done needs to not violate the norms so much that people end up ignoring it and/or labeling the business as spammers. Successful social media behavior may not always be in line with etiquette, but it does keep the etiquette in mind and respects the power of that etiquette.
So what makes successful social media behavior? Something which isn’t overly spammy or advertising, which offers a benefit to other people, and makes it fun to get that benefit, and mostly importantly doesn’t go overboard with the message. The tendency to try and push a message out as much as possible is what ends up creating unsuccessful social media behavior. Plan your time for sending the message and you will get people interested in what you have to offer. Plan your frequency around that time, but don’t overdo it and people will accept it. Offer something of value and people will accept if you break a few norms. But do it with recognition that overdoing it will kill your campaign.
