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Social Media 101, or, How Not to Win Friends and Influence People
We live in a marvelous age. Technology has opened up means of communications to us that were beyond the imagining of our ancestors even forty years ago (trust me - I was there). We have the ability to send instant messages anywhere in the world for as close to free as possible, and to find people with no more effort than a little bit of typing at our desks.
I've been pleased to have reconnected with old friends through social media such as Facebook, after losing touch with many over the years. Some were easier to find than others, but overall, it's been a whole lot easier and magnitudes cheaper than searching the old fashioned way. Some I found, and some found me instead, and it's been fun catching up with them after all this time.
It's great as well to be able to post a single update, and have it visible to hundreds of friends. Rather than needing to send individual messages with the same content to all, one post covers it. Likewise, I can keep up with hundreds of friends by scrolling through a news feed, rather than waiting for all those individual messages.
There's a flip side, though, to social media contacts, and one of my pet peeves - using social media as nothing more than a means to sell or recruit friends.
While those of us on sites such as Facebook enjoy hearing the latest news from the lives of our friends, what we rarely enjoy is seeing nothing from certain ones except self-promotion. When every post or almost every post contains a pitch of some sort, we're left wondering if we're friends, or if we're nothing more than potential customers. Would I get "unfriended" if I declared that I will never buy their product or service? Would they wish to remain in contact with me because we are truly friends? Or would I be written off as a "dead-end"?
This has been an issue to which I've been especially sensitive, because I fear becoming one of those kinds of "friends." I have a book in print, and a second which should go to print here within the next few months. I've invested my time and resources (including money) into these books, and I have both the incentives of loving it when people read my stories, and of hoping to recoup at least some of my investment, pushing me to promote my work.
To be completely honest, I'm a much better writer than I am a salesman. Overall, I believe it's better to err to the side of less promotion, than to the side of too much. I don't want my friends wondering if the only reason they're on my friends list, is so that I can try and sell them copies of my books. Yes, I would love for them to buy my books, but if trying to sell books is going to cost me friends, I'd rather not sell any more copies at all.
It's a tough balance, to be sure. We shouldn't feel ashamed to promote the products and services we have to offer. In many cases, people don't patronize our business because they don't know we have one, and when they finally learn of it, they wonder why we took so long to mention it. At the same time, those same folks can easily weary of too frequent mentions of our business. They might either block us, tune us out, or completely remove us from their friends list.
Perhaps the best gauge we can use, is to examine our posts on social media. Do I show sufficient interest in what my friends are saying about their lives? Do I get involved in their discussions, or do I only want to draw them into mine? What percentage of my posts have to do with things that a friend would be interested in, and what percentage have to do with what a potential business contact would be interested in?
This, of course, applies primarily to our personal pages / accounts / etc. Many people seeking to promote businesses on social media create specific accounts for their business. They'll have separate friends lists for their personal account and their business account, and the balance of the content will reflect the interest of each group. Someone who isn't interested in the business side of our lives, just doesn't follow the business account, and we should respect that decision.
At the risk of opening a whole different can of worms, these same principles can apply to political content, religious content, social causes, etc. We are all entitled to our views, our beliefs, and our causes, but if our friends perceive that our only purpose in being their friends, is to subject them to a nearly constant barrage of posts intended to sway them to agreeing with us, they're likely going to look elsewhere for friendship, leaving us with only those who already agree with us anyway.
If we're going to be friends on social media, then let's be friends, and let anything else happen as a natural extension of friendship.
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