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.