I’ve been writing a lot about the social aspects of social media and also thinking about what makes social so important and I’ve come to the conclusion its social context that interests people. What I mean by social context is context where the social relationship is established before the business relationship. Social context doesn’t just occur in social media, but in social media it needs to be more developed because many of the visual and verbal cues are missing from text.
People do business with people they trust and in part this means that people do business with someone who has established some social context that enables each person involved to feel like they know each other enough to feel comfortable doing business. In social media, to establish social context involves recognizing that the majority of it will be established through other mediums, but that some of it will also be established using social media. For example, initial impressions are essential for creating good social context. A well written invitation to connect can help a lot, but what also helps is demonstrating consistent social interactions on social media sites.
When I see that someone has decided to follow me on Twitter, I check out his/her account and usually can tell if the person is just trying to sell something or is actually engaging people socially by the amount of responses or lack thereof the person makes. This holds true for other social media sites as well. Looking at how people are using sites will tell you how interested they are in establishing a relationship as opposed to pushing a product.
Social context is important in every type of relationship a person has. We owe it to ourselves to consider how we can build social context in social media in order to open the door to more business and closer relationships. In the case of social media building social context means framing the conversation around learning more about a person while also appearing consistent in how you interact. If you do that, you can develop trust and from that create opportunities.
