Engaging with Your Audience: Why People Matter More Than Schedules

The amount of dashboards available to control your social media updates is amazing. From Hoot suite to Buffer to everything else, most of the social media updates of brands and often people too are from these dashboards. Researches have been done on what is the optimum time of posting on Facebook and Twiiter. There are experts who often write lengthy blogposts on which are the platforms to use for marketing your content with least of efforts. No, I am not saying they are wrong. It’s just that I think these days we place too much importance on automated updates than actually engaging with people who faithfully follow us.

If you are a star on any of these platforms, have your blog and other social media updates followed and shared by thousands of people, have you ever interacted with any or some of them?  Everyday countless posts are written and published. If you are a regular in digital publishing, you    Are probably concentrating more on what you are writing, and how to make sure that your posts get seen (views), appreciated (likes), and shared. But what about reaching out to your regular audience for some feedback? Oh yes, some people will tell you that it is not scalable, not when you have thousands of readers and followers. But if you ask me, even if you can strike up a genuine conversation with at least one of them, it will mean a lot to your audience.

I share a lot of my knowledge with my followers. Some people may say I am a good amplifier. Well, if you don’t know, in Twitter language, amplifiers are people who retweet your content. For you they may be just a number, but speaking from an amplifier’s perspective, I like it when an odd tweet decides to thank me for this. It feels nice, and I feel connected.

Social media platforms, I feel, are all about being social. It’s about getting connected to people, and not accounts. It’s about sharing your thoughts and your knowledge, it’s about building relationships more than just connecting. It’s this uniqueness of these platforms that has made people celebrities exclusively in social media.

My child follows a YouTube channel called Superwoman. It hosts videos made by a teen Indian-American girl who regularly talks about her life as a teenager caught between the two cultures, that of Indian and American.

What amazes me is the easy way she tells the story of her daily life, twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and the simple way she makes a connect with her audience, the teens. Apparently all friends of my child follow her, and even if they are not Indian-born expats. She has a Twitter handle, and once a while compiles all the Tweets and shows them in the videos and even does episodes on questions raised in her twitter sessions. If you ask me, this is one huge example of audience engagement on social media. Her audience, the teens, feels  that she cares, that they matter to her, and in turn feels appreciated.

People matter, especially if you are sharing content. People matters more than likes, shares, and tweets. And if you care about your people, chances are they will care about you too.

Connecting Socially: The Power of Writing

There exists, for everyone, a sentence – a series of words – that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. – Philip K. Dick

If you are a writer, then you must have thought at least once, to change the world through your writing. Okay, not once, but many times, may be? We writers are dreamers and we love to dream of changing the world order through our writing. Haven’t we grown up hearing, pen is mightier than sword? But is it? Really?

I am of the opinion, that yes, it is. Well, in this day, I can perhaps modify it to include the keyboard of the laptop as well. But the essence remains the same, words are powerful. Words can build of break things, people, or change course of history. You don’t believe me? Egyptian Revolution of 2011 gained momentum with Wael Ghonim starting a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said.” Protesting against police atrocities on common people, including 28-year old Khaled Mohamed Said, who was killed by police, the page has more than 250,000 likes.

If you look around, there had been many such instances of words changing the course of events. Remember Anna Hazare and how his movement gained ground? It’s because you and me, we wrote about it. Today, it doesn’t matter if you are a blogger, or a full-fledged writer. So long as you lend your words to a cause, so long as you strike a chord with your audience, you have the power.  Coming from the land of Bengal, since childhood we have been told about the power of words and how our history has been shaped by it. We are always reminded of Rabindranath Tagore, and Bankimchandra, people who wrote India’s national anthem and song. If that’s not power of words, then I don’t know what it is.

So next time you stare at a blank page, waiting for an inspiration to hit you for your newest blog post, think social, think change. Donate a thought and watch it influence people. Never underestimate the power of words in changing a society. May be the society is waiting for you? What do you say?

Connecting Socially

Why connect socially?

Do you really need an answer to this? Don’t you see all your friends, family and neighbourhood connected through social media? And yet everyday I come across people who feel that social media is a waste of time and will in no way affect their lives, personally or professionally. And then again I meet great converts to the religion ca led social media, people who were as vehement of not joining earlier and now are equally satisfied by hugging this platform totally. The power of sharing is truly mind blowing.

So does your business need social media?

My sister, who runs a couple of play school and daycare centres in Bangalore, India, has just now started a Facebook page for her business and has been taking my advice since the page’s inception. Until now I have never seen her much in social media, she’s a reluctant participant in the platform. And yet, she’s a convert now.

Jo, who runs a jewellery business, on the other hand, is a small business owner who uses social media Iike a professional, and makes regular posts updating her audience about her latest collections. New in the business, she already has a healthy size of followers with whom she interacts regularly. Facebook and whatsapp are her trusted tools of business.

Social media is part of our lives now and it’s difficult not to accept its role in our daily lives. We share photos, quotes, news and stories with our friends and followers almost like a daily habit. Our children are forever on these platforms, if we let them. Yes, the nature of the platform changes, according to our demands. Google has just recently closed down Orkut, one of the first global social media platforms, due to lack of user engagement. If today Facebook and Twitter rules, tomorrow it may be another platform which will catch the fancy of a younger audience.

But social sharing is yet to stay. The question is, are you willing to give this opportunity to connect to a global audience a miss, or you are willing to take a chance and stay socially connected? It’s time, as an entrepreneur, for you to take a decision.