For those of you who are unacquainted with the concept of social media optimization, it is basically a marketing method involving the use of social media to attract visitors to website content. The term was coined by Rohit Bhargava, who suggested a framework known as the 5 rules of social media optimization, which was later enhanced by various commentators and became a rather bloated, repetitive, and exceedingly-commonsensical version with 16 rules in total. The idea that something as fluid and rapidly-evolving as social media can have “rules” is laughable at best. At the risk of dwelling into semantics, the more appropriate word is “guidelines”.

Social media is changing all the time because the way through which we interact with each other morphs over time due to cultural, environmental, and technological changes. The basis of social media is human, emotional connections. The simple reason that people “do” social media is that it fulfills their socio-emotional needs, e.g. by gratifying their senses. To win the hearts of social media natives, social media marketers – who want to succeed, of course – need to pander to the socio-emotional needs of their target market.

Therefore, I propose the 1 Golden Rule of social media optimization:

Make Your Target Audience’s Life Better.

This rule is wide enough to cover a whole host of activities, tactics, and strategies, and is fundamentally timeless. People use social media to seek rewarding emotional or sensory experiences, so anyone who gives them just that is likely to be held in high regard. To provide consistent value as genuinely as possible is perhaps one of the most effective ways to build trust, loyalty, and, to borrow a word from Simon Cowell, likeability. These are intangible yet powerful assets that can be leveraged to generate a lot of sales, which is the ultimate immediate goal of a business anyway.

What sort of experiences are we talking about? Some examples that I can think of include good old humor, intellectual enrichment, inspirational content, epiphanies, nostalgia, content evoking extreme emotions (sadness, shock, retrospection, admiration, etc.), and anything that evokes unique feelings. The last point is important because it is not unique, differentiated content per se that makes people care but unique content that are effective in creating novel opportunities for self-discovery and emotional exploration.

I can picture that, if you are reading up to this point, you may be disappointed, in that this rule is not actionable enough and requires further analysis to formulate into concrete, specific tactics to put into action. However, this Golden Rule is not devoid of value; a cursory observation of how a lot of businesses are putting social media marketing into practice shows that they fundamentally do not understand the mechanics of social media. The question to ask is really quite simple, “Whatever I am going to do, is it going to make my target audience’s life better?” If you treat your target audience well, continually pique their senses, and authentically give them the value that they want, everything will start to improve and, in some cases, things will even take care of themselves (things like “engineering” a viral loop, but I will leave that for a future post).