Social media marketers are generally loathed within the technology industry. They often go by a myriad of self-conferred titles, such as “social media guru” and “social media expert,” leading to the emergence of embarrassing parodies, such as this (by the way, “guru” is something that other people call you). The problem is obvious: social media marketers tend to talk a lot but achieve very little.

The objective of any social media marketer, and indeed any online marketer, is to build leads and increase sales. ROI is non-negotiable, and ROI has to be measured in dollars and cents. To be fair, social media is fairly young (even by internet standards) and constantly changing, but to substitute traditional ROI for newer metrics like followers, fans, tweets, mentions, conversations, etc. does not build a business case that justifies investment.

In other words, all social media marketing activities have to be sales-centric and geared towards pushing the target audience through the sales funnel. The most obvious yet dubious way to achieve this is to employ sales-laden speak in all communications with the community, which would very quickly alienate the community whose intention is to use social media as a channel of communication to reach the brands and companies that its members care about. Introducing market norms within a context governed by social norms is bound to upset community expectations and violate trust.

The better way, as I have always suggested, is to focus on making the target audience’s life better. Contextual relevance is crucial in determining whether a sales-motivated communication is perceived as helpful or annoying. For instance, a community member asking for advice or suggestions will welcome a product recommendation if it genuinely solves her problem. Make a market norm seem like a social norm.

How do you conduct social media marketing?

Twitter is huge, but increasingly, people are starting to doubt its future prospects. As big as it is, Twitter trails behind its contemporary, Facebook, in terms of size, by a factor of three. I have often asked people around me who are users of Facebook but not users of Twitter why they do not use Twitter. Almost unanimously, they say, “I don’t get it.” Probing further about what they “don’t get” merely confirms my own theories.

They “don’t get” the point of broadcasting their thoughts when nobody is listening. They “don’t get” the point of sharing content when nobody is responding. They “don’t get” the point of following the updates of strangers who have very little impact on their own lives. In other words, there is very little “social” (which I define as “reciprocity”) in Twitter. Nobody cares about anybody; everybody is too busy tooting their own horn, oblivious to the fact that nobody is listening. Marketers are peddling their product offers, publishers are promoting their content, and casual individuals are indulging in self-satisfying monologues. It is a market with too many producers and too few consumers.

The true reason for Facebook’s relative success over Twitter is that Facebook encourages reciprocity. Users can “Like” stuff and comment directly on content. This creates a cycle of two-way activity that sustains a thriving community. Twitter, on the other hand, is not built for conversations, especially in the way that it chronicles conversations. The focus is on content creation, not on meta-content activity (other than retweets). Content creators will stop creating content when there is no reaction from the community. Adding a “comments” section for each tweet, for instance, would tremendously increase engagement and further spur content creation.

Of course, Twitter is beginning to introduce some interactivity, with its new makeover. My guess is that these changes alone will not make Twitter mainstream, because the lack of optimization for two-way communication is still unaddressed. Get that issue sorted out, and perhaps the average Joe might start “getting it.”

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).