SOCIAL MEDIA DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE – TURN FANS INTO WORKERS

Social Media! It’s all around us. Everywhere you look it’s: ‘Like Us On Facebook’ here and ‘Tweet Us’ there. If your social media interaction methods become ineffective or outdated, then you need to view your social media from a different perspective. I want you to set some rules aside and drive with me in this theory that I have been developing, it will definitely change your perspective and give you something to think about.

Now let’s set a play field for this, now let’s do a little bit of assumptions, do not consider your social media channel as a social media channel for your brand, forget about that, please from now on  consider your social media channel as a standalone company, obviously, have your budget that you get for your company, but consider that as a standalone budget for your company, you have the capital, that is, people who work there, the tools that you have. For example, different platforms, different tools that make your job easier as a social media manager.

So you kind of have some predispositions to be a Standalone Company. Why are we saying that, because I want to get out into the different point of views. Now you as a social media manager, consider yourself as the CEO of this company. You have associates and people who help you which are the board of directors and the managers of this company, and now things start getting interesting in this theory. The customers, and fans that you have, consider them as your workers, as the workers of this company, why, because obviously when we do content that we publish on social media, we want that content to be engaging, and we want people to click, we want people to share, we want people to discuss about that content and even that slightest action from people is consider as working.

It takes work for a guy to move the mouse and click; it’s something very small, but it is work, or to write a comment and give you feedback about something, it’s work. From now on we are going to talk about customers as workers and when we say workers always have in mind that they are your customers and your fan base. Why are we saying this, because, you have to put the whole social media management that you do in a different perspective, in an “HR” perspective, in a management perspective, in a financial economic perspective.

Why, because let’s say, the basic thing that drives our page is engagement, because we want people to engage, we want people to click, share, we want people to comment. So now consulting with a lot of PhDs, professors, people with economic and financial expertise and people that do not have a lot of experience in the new digital world, when I ask them how do you understand engagement, they say that engagement is commitment, and this let me develop this theory.

I said  to myself, okay, I do not want to engage fans, I want committed workers, I want my fans to be committed, I want my fans to work together with me to develop my brand, to develop this company that I operate online. So how do we do this?

• First of all, we start with alignment;

We need to align our workers with the goals and values of our brand. That means we need to post everything in our social media channels with the flavor, a little pinch of our brand, and you might say, for example, it’s hard to publish and to make a lot of content, but I will challenge you the opposite because you don’t need to create, the problem is people think they need to create a lot of content but it’s the opposite, don’t think about it like creating content, think about it as documenting,

So you need to document content!

Everything can be documented, you don’t need to think a lot when you create a piece of content, you can go outside your HQ, take a picture of the building, and then make that post and make it engaging, for example, you can ask, do you like the flowers that we planted outside the HQ? Do you like this…, do you like that? That means when you document stuff like this, you can be more persistent, that way you raise the volume of the content that you produce by documenting.

So by documenting a lot of content your fans will understand your brand values, they will understand your brand goals and they will understand your brand in total. That means, they will know how your brand speaks, what are the colors, how do you write, how you interact, etc. This means aligning your workers “fans” with your brand.

• The next step is contribution;

This is the most serious one because here you expect your “workers” to contribute in this company, so you expect your fans to contribute in the channel that you manage. And how do you achieve that, you achieve that when you put yourself in a coaching position, now don’t mix the words, let’s say, trainer or mentor or coach. I am asking you to coach people and from the coaching perspective, if you want to coach you need to ask people questions. Let’s say a basketball coach, will ask the player, “Have you eaten today?” “Did you do the push ups, did you do the sit ups, did you do this and that?” Then the coach gets the feedback from the player, and then he implements that and he lets the player do all of the work himself and then he gives the appreciation for that work that he did.

Generally, talking financially, from the economic point of view, in all of the companies, its proven that 20% of the workers do the work for 80% of the revenue, but it does not mean that the 80% don’t work, it’s just the lower class. That means that you also have to be in this coaching position, you and your managers “you the CEO of this company” to create this content, document this content you are the 20%. Then the 80%, that is, your workers “fan base“ will start working, so when they start contributing, you can ask them to do this contribution in different aspects, you can ask them questions on your post, you can do different campaigns, let’s say, post content with this hashtag and brand that hashtag and make them post content for you. So you the 20% with coaching techniques make the 80% contribute.

So now you are getting content, but what happens then? We come to the third part of this circle, that is, the appreciation part, which is very important because when they align with you, they contribute for you, then as workers they want to be appreciated, right?

• Appreciation is the third part of the circle.

You and your job, you align with the company that you work, you contribute your work for that company and then what? You want your salary, your bonuses, you want different rewards.

In the same view, your fans will like to get an appreciation for the work they get done, here you come with the different types of content, you can do for instance, prize games, you can give them different type of prizes, you can choose let’s say, the fan of the week, the fan of the month, and then you can do different types of appreciation and give them a lot of benefits and a lot of rewards towards the contribution they did. You can take this into a more personal level, for example, personally thank everyone that gave their share, or if someone gives you a good comment and you know that is a good comment and helping someone, you can go and interact on that comment or conversation and then thank all of the people contributing there.

You have to be thankful, and that is that human touch that we need to bring into digital marketing because being a nice person is about being grateful and being thankful, and as a brand, we have to be the same thing online.So after we have this, we have the last part of the cycle, that is:

• Commitment.

Commitment closes up the whole cycle with alignment, contribution and appreciation. Under commitment we have fans, we have “workers” that are willing to go above and beyond for your brand, because by this point if someone says something negative about you on your social channel, you will have workers there to intervene and do let’s say, do customer service for you because you have committed people, you have a committed fan base and so they will go and reply the negative comment and say “no this is bad…” they will give you positive feedback on the issue and they will do customer service for you that will generate content and everything! But the point is that, this whole cycle is an all spinning wheel, you cannot stop it, so you need to spin it and spin it. Spin it with new users, new people, and spin it for the current people, so it’s a wheel that needs to spin, spins all of the time.

For 2018 I have some prediction that we will have more in depth analytics, in depth insights, focus on different metrics and we will have personalization and the content that we will produce will be more personalized and also machine learning is being developed more and more, we have this kind of innovations coming, so it’s a market and it’s a community where we can actually test and try this kind of stuff. It’s something in the theory, it’s something I have been developing and it’s giving some results in practice. And as I said it’s a cycle that needs to be on going, and in my perspective is adding that human touch to the whole digital world that we manage because in the long run we all want to have committed workers and people that come and contribute for us in our brand.

So it’s something that I am developing, it’s something that I want to challenge you to see this social media in this perspective and I want feedback from you. Feel free to comment, discuss and network with me! Cheers!

The 1st publication of this talk was during the Social Challenge Week 2017.
You can view the VOD of the speech there at www.socialchallengeweek.com

Article avaiable on Soundcloud :

Article published on Linkedin also , you can read it HERE

Video posted on YouTube also: