Everyone one of us has done this. You get a fresh idea, usually late at night, and you fire off to the laptop to caputre it before it escapes you. I see it with my clients quite often. They reach that point where social media represents that magic elixir to spark sales and the clear strategy is to create profiles on every social media site they can find in a keyword search.
A day or two after they complete their “setup” phase it hits them…now what?
I encourage each of my clients to look to the strategy and goals first. Once they know what they want to achieve and have an idea of the big “how” they can start to focus on the minutae by defining tactics that will deliver them the desired results.
My real life example may seem familiar to a lot of people. I too set up every profile I could so that no one would beat me to the cool username or to at least make sure I wasn’t missing anything cool on this new service with 25 users. Then it hit me…”now what?”.
The Facebook – FriendFeed drama led me to my most recent review, a closer look at my social media footprint and some drastic slashing and burning. I cleaned out my bookmarks, reordered my browser’s link toolbar and unsubscribed from a plethora of feeds that have brought me little if any value since my last purge. I even moved a few profiles to the background of my daily life.
Taking a step backwards feels really good, great in fact. During the spring cleaning of my list of feeds I rediscovered a few old classics. I added a few new ones and not surprisingly, this morning found myself ready to dive in full steam.
Taking a step backwards brought clarity, a sense of accomplishment at 8:29am and I would argue a noted level of progress for today…and I am just getting started!
Have you cleaned out your social media closet lately? I’d like to hear your story.
The illustration courtesy of: everydaypants / CC BY 2.0