There are businesses out there that “Push” stuff at people and there are businesses that realize that customers have changed. Customers now “Pull” stuff that they are interested in. Those businesses that develop the art of listening and conversing are those who are set to benefit from the change.
I will continue tomorrow with another “Social Media Minute”. For today, I want to jump up on my soap box and rant for a while. This post was started by a tweet that I threw out there. This was what I tweeted:
If you want to use Twitter for your business, you need to engage others. Don't just broadcast and waste your time
— Jeff Brown (@4JeffBrown) October 27, 2012
I quickly had Anita Hovey and William Murray chime in:
Exactly! RT @4JeffBrown: If you want to use Twitter for your business, you need to engage others. Don't just broadcast and waste your time
— William C Murray (@WilliamCMurray) October 27, 2012
@4JeffBrown @WilliamCMurray probably not…because they're auto linking and don't actually come to Twitter much…sigh
— Anita Kirkbride (@anitakirkbride) October 27, 2012
I like what Anita and Willam had to say in their remarks. Their comments inspired me to write my monthly article for my local chamber on the topic of listening versus broadcasting. Here are some excerpts on what I wrote:
“Many businesses are now using social media. But some are not doing it correctly. Even worse, they are irritating their customers. They are pushing out lots of information to their customers. But pushing out information one way can hurt their social media marketing efforts. It is not very “Social”. This pitfall is called broadcasting.”
“When a business broadcasts, they are showing that they do not value conversations. They only want to get their message out. From my own experience, conversations can create opportunity. When a business talks with their customers, opportunities can arise.”
“So what is the solution? You still can share your information, but you have to learn to build a community around your business. This takes conversations, engagement and listening. A business has to take their customers through the process of “Know, Like and Trust” to reap the benefits. Broadcasting does not build this process. It erodes it. You need to focus on listening to your customers and developing a business relationship with them.”
A smart business will realize that social media is not their new PA system for broadcasting. Social media is a means to converse with their customers so that they can start developing business relationships that will be good for both sides. Relationships produces conversations. Conversations produce opportunity. And so I leave you as I started:
Listening to your customers can produce opportunities 🙂
— Jeff Brown (@4JeffBrown) October 28, 2012
If you need some help using Twitter, there is a link to my new eBook in the upper right section – “Essential Twitter Skills for Business”.
