The Future of Social Media

Marketing your brand on social media is a must these days. With platforms like Facebook that have over 2 billion users to YouTube that has billions of video views each day, social media is huge. But, and this is a big but, most agents are getting social media wrong because they are treating it like traditional Web 2.0 marketing: get as many channels as possible then blast your content out to as many people as possible. This “eyeball marketing” approach is both outdated and ineffective in a rapidly evolving digital world where customers demand more from marketers. In this article, we share three ways you can understand social media marketing more and crush it to generate spectacular results.

Social Media Is Like Boxing

In his book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk compares social media marketing to boxing. What is not obvious from the title is that like boxing, social media is misunderstood. For most people, boxing is a brute sport where two players pummel each other until one player falls to the canvas. But this is not what boxing is. According to boxing experts, boxing is more akin to chess where each player tries to outmaneuver their opponent through each subsequent punch. Similarly, social media is not about getting as many channels as possible and blasting out as much content as possible to get as many likes/views/follows/etc. as possible. Social media marketing is more nuanced and intricate than this and must be approached as more of a science that is focused on cultivating a lasting community around a brand.

First Over-deliver then Ask for the Sale

Following on the boxing illustration, the winning player triumphs by first delivering smaller jabs before unleashing a right hook. This is a mistake most agents make with social media marketing. They focus on the right hook (asking for something) instead of the jabs (delivering value.) Think of it this way; if you are talking to a customer and all you said was give me the sale, there would be no foundation on which such a request would be able to rest. With social media, you need to focus on delivering so much value that when you do ask for something in return (an email address, a sale, etc.), your audience will be more than willing to comply. If you want to build a relationship with your audience, you need to first communicate with them, and you do this by over-delivering value.

Context Over Content

Social media is not a distribution channel but somewhere to natively sell stories. – Gary Vee When most agents think of social media marketing, they have this picture of a newspaper or magazine distributorship where you have a bunch of subscribers who receive a pile of content every month. But social media is so much more than this. When people get onto social media, they go there to connect, hence the term “social.” When you miss this crucial aspect, you dump poorly created and contextualized content on all your social media channels and move on. Instead, you need to realize that communities on social media respond to contextual conversations and stories. For example, communities on Twitter respond to timely market information while those on Facebook respond better to selfie videos and neighborhood tours. By contextualizing your social media marketing, you create stories that your audience can relate to and can see themselves becoming a part of.