Social media marketing and the art of storytelling
Social media marketing isn’t just about telling great stories. It’s all about encouraging your customers and prospects to do the storytelling for you. Effectively forging the connections that link businesses with prospective customers and the quality or value of your connection dictates how effective your social networking campaign is. These connections truly define online businesses in social media networks as they engage their customers in meaningful conversations among other things.
Now it’s great and interesting stories that fuel these conversations and enables internet marketing businesses to be a trusted source and find success in various social media platforms like Google+, Twitter and Facebook. Internet marketing content that makes people tells positive and interesting stories about your products and services elicit the most engagement and conversations in social networks.
Ways to effectively tell a story with social media marketing content
The manner in which you create and present your web content greatly determines the success of your internet marketing campaign in social media. How do you create web content that resonates so well with your target market that it maximizes your chances of getting your story retold spreading the word about your products or services and what you are all about? Here are a couple of ways that you can capitalize on “storytelling” when it comes to creating your web content and grant your business more success in social networking:
- Don’t hesitate to share and talk about your mistakes. Doing so will help you spark genuine interest among your fans and followers. Shared experienced are very endearing and helps people relate to your business and effectively humanizes it. It shows that you are not solely concerned about marketing to the online community but more importantly, be an influential part of it.
- Make use of user-generated online content. The amount of user-generated content created by bloggers and ordinary citizens which can be found online had practically exploded with the introduction of social media networks. That explosion can be leveraged by internet marketing businesses by acting as a trusted and reputable guide filtering useful and quality user-generated content and routing it to their target audience. Be that guide and keep in mind that you may need to edit these content for quality as you route them to your audience.
- Respond to current events and news relevant to your niche or industry. Discuss how these will affect your readers and spin it in a way that it directly relates to your industry or niche market. This makes news or current events less abstract and personalizes it in a manner that your targeted readers will find it helpful and relevant.
- Exert an effort to personalize your content. What does this actually mean though when it sounds way too generic? Well it means among other things, telling people why you are discussing a particular subject and its importance to you. Share its personal significance to you and you’ll likely get people to think why it ought to be useful or important to them too.
- Feature case studies and cite real life examples highlighting your experiences or that of your customers. You can cite individuals that are doing things right regardless of whether they are in your network or not. If you are unable to cite real life examples, you can come up with a case and create your own characters that will serve to exemplify you target reader’s persona. Projecting your content into real life situations will create a good impact on your target audience improving your chances of getting people to share your content.
- Don’t be overly concerned about sounding intelligent and smart. Just talk like a human being. Doing the latter often have the negative effect of sounding too condescending or alienating towards your target audience. Create your social media marketing content with the intention of forging good relationships with people and not just bombard them with marketing content in the hope of making a sale.
