Don't be lazy! Use the right language on social media
Organic PR is all about taking the everyday opportunities in your business and leveraging them through different channels, not least social media.
Often clients worry that using lots of different channels will mean they overkill their customers. However, setting media mavens like Morgan PR aside, very few of your prospective customers will be using lots of different social media channels.
They may be on Twitter or Facebook and perhaps LinkedIn – but relatively few will be thriving on all three. Now effective marketing and PR means effective targeting – so you need to use the language they will recognise and preferably respond to.
Now it has become easier than ever before to simultaneously publish on different platforms it has also led to some of the businesses promoting themselves through social media to adopt a frankly lazy approach of publishing the same message across different platforms.
Take our preferred Twitter tool Tweetdeck, in common with other platforms it allows you to simultaneous tweet, update your facebook status and tell LinkedIn what you are doing.
Now if neutral language is used you could get away with this approach, but that will mean you are not exploiting language that is unique to each specific channel.
For example, LinkedIn with its focus firmly on business users drives less traffic to the Morgan PR website than Twitter or Facebook, but those originating from LinkedIn spend longer on the website and read more pages than the other two sources of traffic.
So just imagine for a moment that you have never been exposed to Twitter and you merrily use LinkedIn... then suddenly one of your contacts begins to update using RT (retweet) and the #hashtags that map trending topics on Twitter. It would be akin to finding a passage of latin in your tabloid of choice and would jar. The same goes with facebook where most updates are normally longer than Twitter’s 140 character limit.
Put simply by saving a few moments be publishing the same message across all platforms there is a real risk that you actually diminish their value and the impact they will have, ultimately reducing your return on investment in social media.
As we tell delegates on our Twitter Workshop (there are a few spaces left on our January Twitter Workshop in Newbury) quality and consistency will always win out over quantity. Simply editing your message to fit each platform and then publishing will stop the confusion in the minds of your prospective customers and that has to be good for your business.