Guy Kawasaki, founder of Alltop and former Apple Chief Evangelist, held a recent webinar on increasing social media engagement. Here, Kawasaki outlined the “Five P’s of Social Media”, which are basically different guidelines on how to orient your social media messaging based on the way that your business communicates with customers & prospects along with what specific social network you will be using.
People (Facebook)
Facebook is mostly about your personal connections, friends, and people that you are connected with the closest. These are people that you know already.
Your organization should communicate on Facebook in a more personal, down-to-earth fashion. Even though this might not be the style that your organization is used to, it remains the preferred format of communication on Facebook and will therefore drive the most engagement.
Perceptions (Twitter)
Twitter is mostly used for broadcasting short-form perceptions on content, situations or events. The term broadcasting is used since you probably don’t know most of the people that follow you on Twitter personally and the content in tweets are so short-form that they almost have a news-ticker feel. This is perhaps why so many journalists and news agencies now use Twitter over the traditional Associated Press news reel when gathering the most up-to-date information on a news topic.
Utilize Twitter as a short-form perception or news update platform. Broadcast relevant and valuable curated and original content on a regular basis. Communicating to your market on Twitter in this fashion with consistency will build target audience engagement over time.
Passion (Google Plus)
Google Plus is a lot like New York City – it’s a big city with a ton of little niche neighborhoods. This is why Google Plus is about sharing your passions in niche groups and communities of other like-minded people. These might not be your friends, relatives or personal connections, but they all share a common niche interest.
Niche interest communities in your industry are a great place to engage prospects if your marketing department is willing to put in the time and effort to curate and develop relevant and valuable content. Engaging in niche communities with general content, especially messages copied from other places, will cause negative sentiment within these communities. However, engaging with relevancy & value will develop engagement with your brand on these communities.
Pinning (Pinterest)
Pinning is all about self expression. Pinterest is not a network that will spark a ton of engagement in terms of conversations, but the sharing and endorsement (liking) features still exist. Therefore, your brand can build a meaningful following on Pinterest with multimedia (photos and videos) that express your brand and relate to your target audience. Mixing in brand offers in a small percentage of the messaging can reap big rewards if your content is relevant and interesting.
Pimping (LinkedIn)
“Linkedin, and I say this quite positively, is for pimping”
– Guy Kawasaki
The most entertaining of the five P’s is definitely the ‘pimping’ framework for LinkedIn. In Kawasaki’s definition of pimping, Linkedin is for positioning yourself as an expert and a facilitator in your industry.
This positioning is becoming even more familiar on LinkedIn with the recent launch of the LinkedIn Influencer program. This program features articles written by approved ‘influencers’, which includes CEOs, celebrities and other famous business personalities. Broadcasting relevant and valuable content on LinkedIn can help position your brand as an ‘influencer’ in your industry and associate your brand with these influencers. This process has proven to grow target audiences.
The ‘Five P’ Framework
Use the Five P’s as a framework to building meaningful messages on social networks. This framework will enable your brand to ‘speak the language’ of each social network and build engagement with relevant audiences that are of high value to your business.
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