How to Make Your Social Media Platforms More Personal? Start with a Person.

The New York Times recently announced it would replace its Twitter “cyborg” with people to provide a more interactive experience. Major news organizations including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal believe a human strategy is an improved strategy…and so should you!

Working in PR and Social Media I’m charged with tweeting and posting on Facebook for some of my clients. I also train them how to use social media platforms to build an audience and engage users. Two of my biggest struggles when training clients (or even speaking to colleagues and peers), are to convince them not to solely rely on a dashboard for posting, and to post current, relevant content.

Don’t get me wrong. Using a dashboard does save time. I am also a big proponent of creating a “content calendar” to plan posts in advance and keep track of company events, conferences, speaking gigs, etc. However, if breaking or pertinent news hits, you have to be comfortable straying away from your dashboard and content calendar in order to post off the cuff. You don’t map out your personal posts in advance, so don’t think you can plan all of your company posts either.

If your content isn’t current and relevant, people will notice. Just like they will notice if you post at 9:01 AM everyday Monday – Friday, or, my biggest pet peeve, if you use hashtags on Facebook (but that is another issue all together)!

In addition to posting up-to-date, relevant news, a successful social media campaign must engage users. The person or persons in charge of social media platforms must re -tweet and respond directly to tweets and Facebook posts. Don’t be afraid of using the @ sign, the re-tweet button, or the reply option; or of sending direct messages to fans and followers. After all, your goal is to build an audience. However, your work doesn’t end there. Once they show up, you have to give them a reason to stay.

Zach Seward, the man behind The Wall Street Journal’s @WSJ account, believes human hosting is the way to go. From the time the @WSJ account transitioned to human posting back in 2010, Seward said, “the metrics went up considerably and almost immediately after switching from automated to personal. We’ve seen the same effect with several other accounts. What we’ve seen by measuring it closely is that human-powered feeds do much, much better than automated ones, by any relevant metric.”

Metrics don’t lie. Try the human approach and see how a personal touch can help build your audience and engage current friends and followers.

To read more about the trend from automated to human-powered, read the article below from Poynter.org:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/133431/new-york-times-tries-human-powered-tweeting-to-see-if-users-value-the-interaction/