Cookie Cutter Social Media Isn’t Sweet

Social media for the most part is a new medium. Its young and its sexy. Every marketer wants it, and every marketing channel wants to be it.

But the reality right now is few marketers know how to truly leverage it.

Due to this many of the current social media optimization and marketing professionals offer up cookie cutter social media solutions. Creating facebook pages, youtube channels, and twitter accounts is not for every company, but everyone is being advised to do so.

If you are a startup, with a product that has not yet come to market, what good is a Facebook page going to do you? Seriously , think about the Facebook community. If you are out actively promoting that page, beyond paid ads on the platform, the users will revolt against your efforts.

Does that mean social media is wrong for a startup?

No.

Lets say the startup is making a new video card for gamers. Digg, reddit, and twitter would be awesome places to target gamers and get your product in front of them. The challenge here is knowing how to leverage each one of these platforms efficiently. Once again you must put the cookie cutter down.

The Fortune 500 is full of companies with failed social media experiements. They are often costly in more ways than one, and the average business cannot suffer these kinds of costs.

Quality social media marketing and optimization can bring you traffic, branding, links, and even conversions. Poor social media marketing and optimization, the kind done with a cookie cutter can cost you money and customers.

If you want to engage in social media do these tips to make sure you are custom fitting your approach to your business:

1. Find out where your consumers hang out. What networks, news sites, or even blogs.

2. Become a part of those communities. Remember you get only what you give in social media. A great piece of linkbait can get thousands of links, because it is a great piece of content enjoyed by the community. A twitter account can show monetization potential because it offers content its stream followers value.

3. Don’t spread yourself over the entirety of social media. You don’t have to be everywhere at once. Make your attacks count.

4. If you are looking for money for social media looks at Research and Development. Social media can be an amazing tool to view the thoughts of your consumer. Take your traditional market research budget and get a better ROI.

5. NEVER put a social community on your site until you have tested the waters of social media optimization. There are tons of examples of company’s whom have started worthless social media networks on their sites or for their customers. There are also examples of businesses whom have made this work. Don’t do it as the first step in your social media optimization attack.

As you can see these tips are pretty vague. Why? Because I told you to stop using a cookie cutter, I didn’t want to give you one!

Now go out and utilize social media wisely, not generally.