Social Media: You need less media and more social

Maybe it’s something we should learn by force. Perhaps there is no ability to listen to the advice of other people or companies. Perhaps it is the desire to experience for oneself the sensation of failure.

Or maybe it’s just another step in the maturation that we all need to realize what things are and are not.

We have passed without realizing, of having absolutely no idea about social networks, to want to have profiles in each and every one of them. And not only that. To make an effort on human to be “present” in each of them.

As for your personal profiles, you can do what you want and what your time and your desire allow you. But a company, and more an SME, can not afford to waste its resources in that way.

You can register on all networks. It is logical and even recommended for issues of user names and secondary linkbuilding (almost all embed a rel “nofollow” in the pages, but some let customize the URL). But, do not “baptize” your profiles until you are absolutely sure you can manage them effectively. If you can not have a presence with a logical temporality, and respond to the comments of your followers, do not panic.

In this maelstrom of social media, I see people boast for numbers of followers, number of tweets per day, number of Klout points won …

Even these people have not understood that the great difference of social networks is that they allow us to “talk”, “listen” and “share”, anything, almost instantaneously from and with any place on the planet.

If you only have half an hour per day to dedicate to your profiles, so that you become obsessed with having 50,000 fans on Facebook? In that time, you will not be able to answer the questions or 10% of your fans.

They have told you that your company needs a blog because it is good for your reputation. And they have put you in the head that you must update it every day. It does not matter how or with what content. But one day, you have risen up inspired and you have written an elaborate post with good content, and you have realized only that the quality will always beat the amount.

Stop obsessing with the figures and obsession with people . For how you can help more people every day, involving your company in that help. It is the only way to grow naturally (and ethically) in social networks.

There are no magic recipes for engagement and “viral” ones. Only the conversation is engagement. Instead of posting 50, 100 or 200 tweets a day, read your timeline and comment on the tweets of the people and companies you follow. Now that is not fashionable, enter and comment on their blogs. Today, they are again trading upwards in the feelings towards people and brands.

There was recently a study that said that 75% of companies do not respond to their followers on Twitter . It is a total and absolute disaster. As my friend Isra García says many times , we are destroying the most important value of these tools ourselves. Connecting very closely with people of flesh and blood.

There is SPAM in the mail, there is SPAM in blogs and we are living with social spammers. People who do 15 checkins per hour on Foursquare, people who publish 500 tweets a day, people who copy and paste articles from other blogs so as not to leave a day blank, and people who download videos from other YouTube to upload them to their profiles.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But soon, very soon, you will realize that you need more social and less media .