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Sometime ago Iwrote on the importance of listening to your social media strategy. But everyone and their grandmother (literally) is trying to get on the social media band wagon. How do you stand out from the social media clutter?

For starters, here are some tips.

Be a geniuinely honest and nice person

Social networks, like real life social relationships are all about social capital. Social capital functions very much like the law of karma. Do good and people will remember you, love you, promote you, and even rescue you from others being mean to you. If you don’t, retribution is just as tough. Remember the backlash towards 3M for not paying the original photographer of the post-it jaguar idea. Add value, help your users

Unlike interruptive marketing you can’t just broadcast and hope that the louder you broadcast the more people will talk to you or about you. Give them something that helps them, and improves  their lives and if they like you they will try to figure out who you are and what you do. I can guarantee you that when they do they will be more open to your message then if you were running after them and screaming your message to them. By the way screaming is what it feels like when you broadcast your messages.

Be clear on what value your app offers

Recently I’ve seen many startup attempts at value adding that fall an inch short of heaven. Three things make them so

1) the startup is not focusing on adding value for their particular niche and is scattered. Be clear. Most users give you their attention for a mere few seconds. Make sure your message is obvious to them.

2) the social media conversation is low interaction (ex on twitter many tweets and retweets but no one on one engaging with users). Do you like someone who only talks and doesn’t listen? I didn’t think so, well same goes for your startup on social media.

3) no mention of how the startup adds value and no call to action to the customer in trying this out. Great to add value but for pete’s sake at least some of the time you should show how your app make me or some aspect of my life better. And once you do that make it easy for me to try it out. Example of this would be a UX design consultant who gives me lots of interesting tweets about design and business but doesn’t make it clear to me what she provides. Finding ways to contact her on her site is also difficult.

Similar Posts:

• Launching a startup entirely via social media, lessons from Tweetphoto
• Top 3 twitter tools (+ Bonus). Must haves!
• Importance of listening to your social media strategy
• My learnings from Startup Weekend and FounderShack (our startup)
• How to develop an effective value proposition for your startup

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