Who's the face of your social presence?

I’ve talked about social media being a conversation and that’s exactly what it is. While there are tons of people who waste tons of time studying social media, it’s basically a conversation about mutual interests. The reason so many Facebook Pages just disappear in your feed is that people don’t interact with the Page and Facebook assumes they’re basically not interested in what the Page saying.

​If you’re having a conversation with your Page’s followers and they’re responding, you’ll find that social media is highly effective. I have a number of Pages that I follow on social media whose content is of big interest to me so their comments and content keeps showing-up prominently in my feed. After all, the job the social media providers like Facebook and Instagram have is to keep you interested so you see their ads so they make more money. Simple. So the more you’re engaging with things on social media, the more likely it is that they’re going to show it to you.

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If what you’re writing isn’t of interest to followers you can bet that you’ll disappear in their feeds. The same message falling on deaf ears is firehosing. I’ve also noticed that organizations with multiple authors also can easily lose followers. 

For example, if one of the authors is engaging with the audience but there are others who have administrative or author permissions and those authors aren’t as engaging, or their conversation style is dramatically different or even the way they spell things is noticeably different then this can lose you followers. 

There is a client I had where I was asked to be the voice on their social media channels. But the owner would chime in now and again and they were so poor at social media that their posts would lose much, if not all, the momentum the organization had gained. 

While the things that I was posting followed all the rules and vision for social media such that it engaged the organization’s following in a consistent and entertaining fashion (I’m not bragging, just following rules for a change). The audience liked the posts and responded and the channels were growing appreciably. Seeing what the audience responded to set the groundwork for what you would schedule in future posts. It’s pretty simple. 

Then came the irregular rants by the owner whose command of the keyboard was less than stellar, the posts were never timed to really reach the audience at the correct time and the messages could easily be misinterpreted, sometimes catching the ire of their audience. In fact some of the audience ultimately blocked the channel. 

The bottom line is that if you have a partner or someone else who has the technical ability to communicate through your social media channels and their style of communication is much different than the individual or group whose job it is to actually engage the audience, it might be a good idea to sit down and come up with an imaginary “face” for your social media voice. Whether that imaginary voice is funny or informative or nerdy or whatever it is, think of that voice when communicating through your social media channels. Perhaps bringing a certain performer to mind from a movie or program that makes the ideal voice for your channels and then using that vision as a guideline for the interaction with your audience. 
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Ultimately I had to let the client go who kept sabotaging their own social media presence. There was no educating them on the power of one voice and the importance of a singular style of communication. 
What voice are you using in your social media channels?