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I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Surprising ways to distinguish yourself on social media
Small business owners, creatives and freelancers are doing the same stuff all over social media. They share tons of links, pretend to be social by using automated thank you messages, share the same "inspirational" quotes and aphorisms and are generally kind of boring. Distinct types of content work differently on all the various social media services, so trying to do the same thing all over the place is futile. Besides, what's the point of doing the same thing as everyone else?
Social media has turned out to be very noisy and in order to get your message over that noise, you are trying to yell louder. However that is not really helping. You are only adding to the noise and noise is not signal. I can remember the time (hey, it wasn't that long ago), when some of us ideologists thought that these new services and technologies would help the signal to rise above noise. Ha. Rather than that, there's now a uniform buzz of selling, yelling, trolling, spamming, scamming and harassing. Signal has been buried somewhere under it.
Most social media users appear to be too concentrated on the game of followers, trying to get as many followers as possible. No matter if anyone who follows you has any time to ever read your posts. As long as they follow, you have succeeded. However you must have already noticed that those followers don't bring you anything. They aren't buying your stuff or services. They are just sitting there, expecting you to buy their stuff and services. You give them more than they give to you. Heck, they aren't even being very good friends, are they?
If you are trying to brand yourself or your business, there's one main thing to do. You must separate yourself from the crowd. Doing the same thing as everyone else, trying to yell your point over all the other yelling, is not going to do that to you. You will blend in and can't distinguish yourself. There are a couple of very simple things to do to get your message out there, without yelling, without following for follows, without being a spammer.
1. Be kind. Social media has became a cesspool of hurtful, even dangerous stuff. People are getting trolled, scammed, spammed, harassed and threatened. Plus everyone seems to have an agenda behind everything they share. Thus unsolicited kindness without ulterior motives is rare and quite unexpected. Be kind without expecting anything in return. Be kind before the other person gets to be kind to you. That's something memorable and new.
2. Share less. Since you have told you must share more to get more of your sharing noticed, you are now flooding your timelines with anything. Any thing. You find a link, you share it. You see a post, you reshare it. You hear an inspiring quote, you put it out there. As a result you are diluting your message. Eventually nothing you share gets noticed, because your followers begin to ignore your updates. You appear as a spammer. More than 15 public posts a day? Way too much. Instead sharing more, try sharing at certain, most effective times. Those times you can find out with a little testing and checking the statistics and insights. Find out when your followers are active on the service and which content gets most attention and choose that as a template. After a while you may need to adjust.
3. Listen more. This kind of goes under the previous point of sharing less, but I decided to rise it as a separate one, because it is very important. 7 years ago, when social media was still considered as a really new thing, it was praised for one thing: The opportunity to listen. For companies to listen to their customers. For businesses to listen to their competition. For people to listen the other people. Unfortunately, due to everyone sharing just way too much, listening has became hard, if not impossible. If you are following lots of people and if they are all sharing a lot, you are not listening to any one of them. Which takes me to the next point.
4. Be choosy. As sharing too much, also trying to be everywhere and for everyone is spreading you too thin. It is, of course, exhausting for you, but also as a result you will become sloppy. You'll try to follow as many people as possible and as a result you only see the updates by the very few. You miss all sorts of cool stuff, plus so many opportunities to create and enhance connections. And you'll start to share the same content everywhere, without paying attention to the people using the service and the special features a service provides. Choose only a couple of services to concentrate on and choose who you follow. Spammers follow for follows, are you a spammer?
5. Show your personality. In the constant noise it can be hard to tell difference between a spambot, automation and a real person. Overusing automation and sharing only those undying quotes, which nobody can verify, and the airy aphorisms is making you seem less like a human. Don't be a robot. You're not a robot. You are a person with a personality. Let it show. Make sure your followers know you at least sometimes check your account and don't just let the automation do all the job. If you are choosy, it is easy. Personality showing posts tend to get more engagement than the general types, because we personalities want to connect with other personalities.
6. Surprise. Having followed all the best advice about how to make it on social media, you have created yourself a plan. Which is not really working, other than you are repeating the same mistakes over and over again. I've noticed that posting the same kind of content, especially at the same times, ends up sooner or later getting ignored. Your followers get bored, they've seen it already. Nothing new. Surprise them now and again, post something out of your usual plan and your usual content, and you'll notice that post gets more engagement. It's also a great way to show that you aren't a robot, but a person.
There you go. A handful of simple ways to distinguish yourself from the social media crowd. Give them a try yourself.
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