Social Media Profile: Business vs. Personal
04.07.09
Monday Madness – Q & A
“Last month, I went to a networking event that had a guest speaker talking about Facebook and Twitter. The speaker told us that we needed to have our entire profile dedicated to our business. She also stated that all of our updates needed to be focused on our business and acquiring more connections. What are your thoughts on this?” Name Witheld by Request
Okay. Any of you that knows me, you already know my opinion here. So, for your benefit, I’m going to answer this question a little differently.
Think about the last time you went to a party. Now, pretend it’s a neighborhood party and you don’t know anyone except the person that invited you. You get to the party, your friend greets you at the door and starts to introduce you to his/her friends.
How does the conversation continue? Is it all about your business and their business? No!
Now in all fairness, the conversation may start there but will quickly turn to more personal items: family, neighborhood, travel, places you’ve lived, weather, vacations, plans for the summer, etc. In comparison to the amount of time that you talk about work, personal information dominates the conversation.
Why?
There are are three levels that we move through in any relationship: understand (do I know you?), decide (do I like you?), move (do I trust you?).
Understand – do I know you?
Personal information dominates a conversation because we want to know about each other. Knowing details about another person is what makes life interesting and allows us to discover whether or not we like someone…to discover if we want to know more. If we want to know more, then we’ll ask and we’ll begin to know someone.
Decide – do I like you?
Once we start to know a person, we make decisions as we learn. We’re deciding if we want to know more and if we like the person. If we like the person, we’ll typically move into other areas of conversation or let down a defense to share something we wouldn’t have during an earlier stage.
Move – do I trust you?
If we feel that we know another person, and we’ve decided that we like the person as well, we then begin to ask ourselves if we trust the person. The conversation moves to asking questions about their business or how you might help them. We make a movement towards a reciprocating relationship based on trust.
The levels can’t happen unless we’re relating on a personal level. So, to answer the question, I think that we need to spend more time in our profiles being personal than business and let people know who we are.
Get social in social media and build a BUZZ about your business!
Deidre Hughey
Other Monday Madness posts:
Social Media and Your Profile Picture
Question About Blog Location
Twitter for Beginners…Part 1
I agree with your advice. Case in point – a good friend of mine was always lauded to other Twitterers by me as ‘the funniest Twitterer I know’. 2-5 Tweets/week, always hilarious, and gave me some insight into what was going on in his life.
He was recently RIF’d into starting his own online shopping/Amazon/Ebay consulting gig, and now his Tweets are much more often (3-5/day), but 100% niche business focused around his line of expertise. I’m sure it’s good info, but it seems to be thrust into a sea of similar content. And, there’s no personality. He could keep the old personal tweets in there at the old level, and all of a sudden he a real person, not an info-bot (albeit a good one I’m sure).
Scott – thanks for coming by and commenting! Too bad about your friend. Hopefully you can help him out by letting him know the effect it’s had on you and how he may be able to keep his humorous tweets with the integration that you suggest. Seems to me that everyone would then win! (And, he would probably sell more!)
Deidre, I totally agree with your advice. Often, when I go through my tweets or on FB, I see many who are just selling what they do, do, do and I often feel as if they are force-feeding me. I love seeing someone’s personality come through and getting to know them on a personal basis. That’s how real relationships are built.
YES! What’s interesting is that so many people teach this as a method to using social media (force-feeding).
Just as in face-to-face conversations where most of the conversation is geared towards offering value to one another interspersed with information about our business, social media should be the same way. It’s simply conversations that have been moved from face-to-face to online. Don’t change the way you relate with people just because you’re in a different medium.
Thanks for the comment, Ann!
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