Creating A “Unique” Social Media Experience

These days, it often seems as though every person with a business or a product has chosen to market their idea via social media. The impetus behind this is completely understandable: social media is cheap, highly accessible, and provides access to a wide demographic of current and potential consumers. A business loses nothing and stands [...]

These days, it often seems as though every person with a business or a product has chosen to market their idea via social media. The impetus behind this is completely understandable: social media is cheap, highly accessible, and provides access to a wide demographic of current and potential consumers. A business loses nothing and stands to gain greater exposure by going the social media route.

This is great, of course, because social media opens up countless PR opportunities for businesses both large and small. But the increasing universality of social media use does, however, have a downside. With a larger and larger percentage of companies turning to online PR solutions, the internet has become a far more “crowded” place. Internet users are bombarded with social media marketing every time they go online. It’s harder to stand out and get heard.

Let’s consider, for a moment, a real world equivalent. Say you’ve set up a fruit stall at a quiet local marketplace. Your stall is straightforward and basic, but the lack of competition means that any visitor will see and consider your stall. But then the market becomes more popular. More and more stalls spring up all around you, and suddenly you’re wedged between a booth that sells personalized pens and a flashy neighbor that also peddles fruit. You no longer have a unique or highly visible offering. What to do? In this case, you may try a few approaches to make your stall more differentiated and unique:

-Highlight distinctions between your fruit stall and a neighboring one

-Narrow the focus of your stall (ie begin selling only peaches)

-Try to move locations in the marketplace and access better traffic

-Build a new stall that stands out more

Now, let’s apply these practical, real-world responses to the world of online social media. After all, whether you have realized it or not, your virtual marketplace is an extremely crowded one. No longer is it purely sufficient to have a social media presence. Now you also need to have a presence that is as unique as possible:

-Highlight distinctions. Use blog and Twitter posts to self-congratulate when a positive distinction comes to light.

-Narrow the focus. You’re not going to change your product offerings (as in the fruit example above), but you can still target your social media activities towards a more narrow range of your consumer demographic.

-Access more traffic. Get more views on your social media pages by working to increase Facebook Likes and inbound links. Generally speaking, a well-focused ad and SEO strategy is very important here.

-Stand out more. Make your social media pages stand out by using services like Pagemodo and taking more risks with web design.

There are many ways to create a unique and differentiated approach in the social media world. Whatever you do, though, keep our marketplace example in mind and take concerted, practical steps whenever possible to stand out from the online cacophony. The social media landscape is an ever more crowded one. It’s also important, therefore, to acknowledge this and react accordingly.