Social Media Tip: Shut Up And Listen

It seems that everyone jumps to the conclusion that you must participate in social media by broadcasting your business information, your domain expertise, and other conversational tactics to win new prospects. While there's no debate that outbound marketing participation is important, there's another axis that can be far more productive in terms of bang-for-the-social-buck - it's called "listening".

Most businesses spend a lions share of their social media time budget broadcasting; indeed they shout often and loud in an attempt to get noticed or to command attention. However, if they dialed that effort back a little and spent more time reading [relevant] social media artifacts, they'd realize it provides a call-down list of prospects, PR opportunities and open doors to new business opportunities and sales development.

I'm not talking about surfing and reading blogs and tweets, etc. - I'm suggesting far more sophisticated methods of developing immediate and sustainable awareness of key social media content that leads to bona-fide business transactions. This requires a carefully designed social media dashboard that is customized for a specific business segments and integrated with relevant conversational transactions. It also requires tuning and maintenance not to mention consistent focus on ones' market segment.

If you invest your time in a social media listening post and use it diligently, you'll naturally develop participation techniques that will far surpass the "broadcast-centric" methodology.

As many of you already have experienced, social media do's and don'ts and the massive topology of social networking services, tools, and applications, is enough to overwhelm even the best GTD advocates. Businesses (large and small) need to streamline the social media process and develop strategic methodologies that are sustainable and profit-minded. A listening-centric attitude is exactly the right axis to make this happen.