Everybody, Get on! It's the social media ride!

As I nibbled on petits fours and sipped afternoon cocktails in yesterday's summery sun, I had the lovely experience of discussing my favourite* social media conversation for the umpteenth time:

Social Media Conversation numero 63:
We're making Facebook groups for all of our sub brands. It's great! What do you think?

It is great that this company has decided to make a move into the new marketing opportunities that have become available. I'm happy that they're trying new directions. But when I began to probe and asked "Why are you going on the FB? Who are you trying to reach and what are you aiming to achieve?" - I was and am often faced with blank stares and silence. It quickly became obvious that the only objective was to put a tick next to "Set up Facebook page" on the to-do list!

Who on earth is going to want to see the page besides staff? And that's often because they have to! If there is no incentive for any of loyalists, indifferents or even detractors to have a look- then forget it. Replicating information from a website is not creating a social media page.

Prior to social media conversation numero 63, it often helps to ask:

• Do we have reason to be on a social media site? Will it help grow our offering in the right way?
• Do people care about us enough to want to engage with us in a social context? Can we create that context?
• What will our objectives be? Sales, awareness, promotions, spread, customer service etc?
• Do we want to engage with interested audience or motivate new user bases?
• Do we have enough to push our page through to the long term? And is there a strategy to keep content fresh?

If even a couple of these questions are answered, it's a good starting point. And at least if some of the initial strategies don't work, it's an easy enough fix to reoptimise and keep moving forward.

*The use of favourite here is to be taken lightly.