I’ve had an interesting back-and-forth via Facebook email with an old friend who is starting an orthodontia practice. I had complained in my Facebook status about my friends “some of whom, in the peculiar world of Facebook, I don’t actually know” who only seem to use Facebook to promote their band or their book or their business.
Some of that is perfectly fine, and when The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy is published, it’s for damn skippy I’ll be talking about it everywhere. It’s a part of me and what I’m doing, but it’s never going to be all of me or all of what I’m doing.
So where do you draw the line? How do you promote your business via social media in a way that won’t get you unfriended? Here’s what I wrote to my friend in response to that question.
The ones who annoy me are the people who I know as people, who friended me as people, and then never share anything about themselves. All they do is talk about their next gig or their business. The worst iteration of that is when they use Facebook email to send me emails about their shows and upcoming events.
In other words, when I signed up to be friends with Joe Blow, I did it because I know him and like him and am interested in his life. I didn’t do it because I wanted to get reminders three times a week on my wall and in my inbox that his band The Puffy Sleeves is playing in Greenville. When all you get is the business and none of the personal, it feels like bait-and-switch.
There’s a book by Jim Tobin from Ignite Social Media called Social Media is a Cocktail Party. The thesis is you don’t walk into a cocktail party and immediately start telling people about yourself and what you sell. You make a connection first, and if it’s appropriate to the conversation down the road, you might mention what you sell.
The right way to use Facebook to let people know about your band or your book or your business, in my opinion, is to create a Facebook page for that entity, then people have the option to “like” that page. When they choose to “like” it, they are opting in to receive messages in their Facebook stream. It’s clear what the purpose is and what kind of information they will be getting.
If you start a page for your orthodontia practice, think about what you can do to make it fun and informative. People have all kinds of questions, concerns, doubts and fears about orthodontia. What could you do to help them understand the big questions, get the right information to make better decisions, and show them that yours is a practice where they would feel welcome and maybe even have some fun?
photo by BarelyFitz