Cease All Your Social Media Advertising Proper Now

What would you do if you had to use social media every single day, but weren’t allowed to do any advertising and marketing?

In other words, no boasting about your new book, no promoting events (even free events), no publishing testimonials from content clients, no affiliate links to other people’s merchandise, absolutely nothing that even hints of marketing and advertising or self-promotion.

What would you do?

Well… Maybe you would:

• Go to Facebook and comment on somebody’s photo.
• Or answer somebody’s question in a LinkedIn group.
• Or comment on somebody’s blog post, explaining how it was useful to you.
• Or publish a blog post, sharing an answer to a question some audience member not too long ago asked you.
• Or re-tweet somebody else’s link to a helpful write-up.
• Or write an Amazon.com book critique for a book you read not too long ago.
• Or participate in a Google+ conversation about a thing that interests you.
• Or “Like” or “+1″ a Web page or weblog post you enjoyed reading.
• Or go to iTunes or the Android Marketplace to give a 5-star rating for an app you use each day.
• Or publicly thank somebody who helped you not too long ago.
• Or add a positive comment to a YouTube video that produced you smile, laugh, cry or believe differently.

What is the point of all this?

When you forget about “advertising and marketing”, you focus on sharing your expertise.
When you share your expertise, you are a lot more engaging.
When you happen to be much more engaging, you develop genuine connections.
When you create connections, individuals want to spread the word about you.
When they spread the word, you construct your reputation.
When you develop your reputation, you turn out to be an authority.

And when you’re an authority, the advertising happens automatically.

Numerous enterprise owners make the mistake of trying to industry directly using social media. But social media is about getting social, not about advertising. When you concentrate on being social, you think about men and women, not items and services.

Of course, that does not mean you have to talk about your social life! You can still be professional and businesslike (and you must be, if you are using it for your organization). But it does mean you are employing it to connect, share, engage and re-connect.

You do not have to give up ALL your marketing and advertising.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying you should by no means promote or advertise just do not make it the principal objective of employing social media platforms. If you want a rule of thumb: Make at least 80% of your activity non-promotional, and at most 20% (preferably less) promotional.