Genuine connections remain the lifeblood of any successful business, but most people are only using social media to get attention. Why is it so important to make our marketing build relationships with people? How do we use new developments in social media to deepen our existing relationships? On this episode, we continue last week’s conversation about getting back to the marketing basics, which is building and deepening relationships instead of being transactional.  

The only thing that can’t be kicked down the road is an interpersonal relationship with somebody. -Greg McDaniel  

Three Things We Learned

How we can leverage YouTube

On Instagram most people consume videos without sound unless it’s really juicy. YouTube is the opposite people go there to consume content you want to see and hear at the same time. If we want to publish content that needs people to hear and see us, YouTube is the best choice.

How social networks shift with time

As a social media network gets more popular, there’s a curve where it’s shiny and people are open to connecting with new people. And then as people try to sell us something or bots enter the picture, we start to shut ourselves off from new connections.

The importance of building new relationships by deepening existing ones

When we think about all the new tools and things that are changing in marketing, our first inclination is reaching out to new people using these tools. What we should actually be doing is reaching out to the people who already know, like and trust us and then leveraging them to get in front of people who don’t know us who can get introduced to us by the people we know.  

For most people using established social platforms, talking to new people isn’t something they aren’t interested in because of just how many people are out there trying to sell to them. Social media has become a place they communicate with people they know. If we want to rise above this, get people to spend time with us online, and eventually get into our real world, we actually have to connect with them right from the start. The more we can shift our intention and attention to building relationships first, the less we might be blocked out by people for being a stranger. What people remember is how you make them feel, and social media can be decent for getting that started if we leverage video, but the connection will still be necessary and that’s what we should be driven by.