An intro to social media strategy

Many organizations simply ignore the proper ways of interacting before they introduce their brand to social media. They are quick to jump in because it’s trendy and popular, but just having accounts on various popular sites does not guarantee a positive return. In fact, Twitter can harm as easily as it can help if you’re not properly prepared.

The most common mistake of new Twitterers is letting their account become stale after only a few days. Ideally, you’ll want to “tweet” at least 2-3 times a day so that each time someone looks at your page, there is something new for them to see. Often I see pages from institutions that only update once a week or perhaps haven’t updated in over a month. Rarely do I give them the benefit of a doubt that “well maybe they’re just busy lately. I’ll check back next week.” This is common behavior for social users: if it isn’t appealing the first time, they don’t come back a second.

Another frequent mistake from organizations is that they use Twitter only to post events and announcements. While this is acceptable if you have a large following (which means that people are already interested in what you are doing and can therefore get away with it), it is not an effective strategy for gaining followers initially (going back to the significance of the first impression).

I have recommended to my team here in web services to tweet at least twice a day. Additionally, we all have separate personal accounts that we use frequently to keep focused on the true purpose of Twitter: interaction. On Terry College’s official Twitter (@terrycollege), we try to keep the verbiage casual and social. We only announce a few events each week, and we offer several direct, personalized messages to individual followers (students and alumni, mostly) that keep the friendly interactions rolling.

We have not even advertised our own Twitter/Facebook/YouTube accounts on the website yet because we’re still tweaking and synchronizing our brand’s personality on each. We have been now since late last year.