The post I’ll promote till the sun collapses

Photo: Kevin Simpson (CC)

Narcissism has never been trendier. The Internet appears to run on nothing but selfies, look-at-me updates and vlog entries.

Should our company’s social media channels focus more on our corporate selves?

Let’s admit one thing: We do like commercials and self-promotion to some degree. For example, we love to rate and razz the commercials during the Super Bowl. And we do allow ads to get to free content on news sites, search engines, social sites and streaming video.

For those of us social marketers, we often feel like we’re balancing promotions with other useful content. (At least, I hope so. Some of us may be on self-promotion full blast.) Even our promotions can be wanting.

My pet peeve in this area is food trucks. It’s easy to verify: Pick a favorite vendor and look at its Facebook/Twitter/Instagram page. Can we tell where this truck within the last few hours, or where it will be next? If I can’t find the truck, I can’t hand over money for delicious tacos and cupcakes.

Self-promotion must correspond with the type of business.

It also must fall within one of the three compelling types: interesting, useful or funny. This rule always applies, even when we’re marketing ourselves and our organizations.

We tend to forget the real way to answer this self-promotion question: through numbers. Are we seeing more followers, more traffic and more sales based on our increased self-promotion? Checking our gut isn’t going to cut it. We should pay close attention to our social media metrics, our site analytics and our sales reports.

Which means we must also be bold in tweaking the script. More self-promotion and better updates could mean stronger marketing, fan pushback or raging indifference. Until we try, we can’t know.

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