Leveraging Professionally Trained Skills in Social Media

We live in an age where everyone has the potential to be a citizen journalist—to take pictures, videos or write blogs to reach the entire world through their social media channels. How does your social media work stand out when everyone is doing this?

Because multimedia photos and videos are the “stickiest” and most engaging content on the web—if you are trained professional, your visuals should be a cut above—should stand above the rest of the non-professional content. The same is true on the writing side—your training should put your writing above the fray, make your words stand out in a sea of less polished, more amateur, untrained verbiage.

Contrast the huge volume of social media content out there with the fact that the scarcest resource we modern humans have–our focus or attention span…we are being bombarded in every direction, every place we turn. Forget the diagnosis that many Americans have ADD or ADHD—our social environment is making us consume media as if everyone really has a problem focusing. There’s a lot of competition for our eyes and ears and it’s overwhelming at times. It is like the 500 cable channel universe applies to every media we consume.

Strategically, as communicators, this means we must adapt our strategies, to reach people in different ways, or in at least the ways, they want to be engaged. From a social media standpoint, that means constantly changing, updating, connecting and collecting data. Very often it’s more important about who you engage than massive numbers, because your audience has an audience of their own. Another way of saying this is that it’s not so much about who or how many people follow your brand, it’s about who follows those who do follow you.

To engage influencers, you don’t want to be “that guy”—the one that is always asking for something, begging for a favor, demanding someone re-tweet or re-post. Meaningful engagement is built over time. When you follow influencers, truly connect with them, commenting on their posts, interacting in a way that positively amplifies their messages so that they may one day return the favor.

Thoughts, questions, comments, reach out to me here or on Twitter at @bengarrettvid