The Goal of all social marketing is simple:
To identify advocates in social media, engage and build relationships with them, and enable them to spread your message virally.
This principle is in my mind immutable for any social marketing effort. It's the reason we are involved in social media for business. And it doesn't matter if your business is personal branding, small business branding or corporate messaging for the largest companies in the world. All of us who are marketing in social media have this same simple goal.
We need to find our advocates who are active and have a following in social media. We need to build relationships with these people. And we need to enable them to spread our message virally in social media to their audience of friends and followers.
So as you approach your next task in social media, whether your writing a Tweet, Facebook update, a blog post or building a new Facebook page you need to consider are you working towards this goal?
All too often we forget about engaging and building relationships and we get caught up in the finding new people to follow race. As many pointed out two weeks ago when I wrote 9 Point Social Social Media Expert, it's not about the numbers. It's about whether we have real relationships with people. Do they find our content, our information, and our connections with them valuable? Or do we simply feed them uninteresting, lines that are all about me, me, me?
So just for today, why don't you concentrate on building the relationships you have in your network. Strengthen them, by reaching out to people who you've not connected with recently and reconnect. Find some people in your network who you aren't familiar with and strive to learn more about them. Go read their blogs, or Facebook pages and learn more about what they do and what they are interested in. This will lead you to a stronger network which will be much more valuable for you.
Give me 1 Good Reason why you can't build some stronger relationships in your network today?