Social Media Is Supposed to be Fun, People!

I always laugh quietly to myself when I hear of a social media marketing expert trying to advise clients on a corporate social media policy. Isn’t that more the realm of human resources and legal departments?

Of course, any other similar issue would be. But social media is scary. People and companies want to use it for their own purposes, while eliminating the possibility that your company could have fun with it. No fun on company time, after all.

The problem with this mentality is that I have seen it lead to far too many failed social media campaigns.

For your company to really find a place online, you have to use social media properly. Begrudgingly spamming thousands of twitter followers with your url while dying a little on the inside is not what I would consider”proper”.

Instead, when you’re developing a social media strategy, think of how you use social media in your personal life.

Okay, so you might spam your Facebook friends with photos of your kids/dog/cat/lizard/whatever sometimes, but that isn’t what we’re talking about today.

When you use social media in your personal life, you engage people.

You tweet them back when they mention you on twitter.

You “like” that picture of them at their company retreat last year (that no one was supposed to see).

You meet someone new and tell them to add you, be your friend, like you, and follow you.

You tweet, like, blog, comment, stumble, ping, and add your way through everything your friend put out in the world, and your friends do it right back.

And why?

Because they’re your friends, that’s why.

And if you apply that same mentality to your social media, you may find that you have a lot more fun – and your results will reflect that.