Messaging in Social Media

From my experience, messaging in social media needs to be authentic, not overly sales driven and creative. You never know what is going to take off and go viral. Messaging that tends to resonate with people seems to be overwhelmingly creative and positive or terribly negative. There is not much middle ground.

From a business perspective, in order to engage people in the social space, the messaging needs to be quick and simple. Social users tend to consume small bits of information quickly before moving on to the next great thing. Therefore, messaging in the social space needs to be short and sweet. Unique information needs to be communicated efficiently. Clearly, this takes various forms depending upon the platform being used (YouTube videos under 3 minutes, Tweets under 140 characters, quick and clever Facebook Posts, appropriately organized Flickr and Pinterest accounts and blog entries that are only a couple of paragraphs long). The sales message needs to be strategically mixed in but not the general focus of all content. A business wants to become a thought leader or content resource for their specific markets. Once this is established, then a small sales message can be mixed in.

If engagement from fans, followers etc is what the company is going for, then the opportunities for interaction need to also be quick and easily accomplished. Social media by nature teaches people to have a short attention span. Messaging in the social space is completely different from other more traditional communication mediums. For the Colorado Springs CVB, a lot of things are discovered through trial and error. For instance, we have found that "write a caption for this photo" or "fill in the blank" posts on Facebook tend to be more successful than the other types of posts that we have tried. Social media will continue to evolve and we will have to evolve our messaging along with it.