The Social Media One Night Stand
You meet, you hook up and then you’re never heard from again. When doing social media engagement don’t be that guy (or gal). Timely, transparent responses are a social media best practice, but without the follow-through to future relevant comments it can mean very little.
If you post a comment, whether it be a tweet or on a blog post, you need to return to see what other relevant comments follow. Without this you are not really engaging you’re simply passing by. It’s a lesson easier said than done, but you have to move beyond simply replying to the relevant conversations to making sure you track and follow-up with where you’ve replied as if that’s the only place you are posting.
This was recently brought to my attention when I was researching the company Referral Key. I came across an influential review of the site from Claire Diaz Ortiz (Social Innovation Lead at Twitter and over 324,000 followers on Twitter) that ranks #1 for the search term “referral key reviews.” The review mostly took a wait-and-see approach to the company. What I found most interesting was the comments section that followed.
Chris, a Referral Key employee, wrote an excellent comment that was transparent, timely, clarified several questions the article had about the service, provided a customer review and included contact information. I was honestly impressed.
That changed however when two comments down is a post that is rather scathing towards Referral Key and Chris in particular.
While it’s true that you can’t please everyone and some comments just are not worth responding to I would say that because of the high visibility of this blog you have to respond. Another response from Referral Key does not exist.
I don’t write this to pick on Referral Key, I do use them as an example of exactly what to do and what not to do with social media engagement. Remember to be more than a one night stand when doing social media engagement. We all have lots of reasons why we didn’t call back. To your customers and potential customers it’s nothing more than excuses.
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