Our clients always ask us the secret to social media success, and we just shrug. The secret may be that there’s really no one secret.
But if we look at the most successful campaigns we’ve created at The Found Gen, there’s often one key ingredient we’ve added to the mix that makes them uniquely effective: kindness.
The secret always seems to be rooted in the idea to persuade people to like you and your brand more than they like someone else.
We’ve revamped more than a few accounts where the content managers wondered why more conversations weren’t happening on their feeds. We found most of them to be perfectly informative and generous with their expertise. But they were missing the personal element of basic kindness.
Now, more than ever, your audience wants to be part of an intimate conversation. They want to be charmed. They want to belong.
There are three ways to make sure that happens:
- Be contagious. Kindness inspires more kindness. In fact, researchers found that the ripple effect of one act of kindness is at least three degrees. Think about your content as a conversation, and a nice one at that. Give away insider information, and also ask questions of your customers. “What are your concerns? How can we help?” Those questions are a fantastic start to approaching fresh content.
- Be specific. If you value kindness in your content, what does that look like in terms of daily output? Create a list of actions, big and small, that you can implement immediately. And not just for yourself: Create calls-to-action for your customers, too: Share this information with your friend, get more information here, and sign up now are all workable directives.
- Your metrics, if you pay attention, will tell you exactly how your audience responds to your content. We’re guessing they’re most responsive to your most authentic, compassionate content, right? (You can get back to us later, but we’re pretty sure we’re right on this one.)
Most importantly, be kind even when it’s difficult. One of life’s most important skills is writing a nasty, angry email, letting it sit for a minute, then deleting it and moving on.
Kind content marketing is not a one-hit wonder or a viral hit-or-miss. It’s a daily habit that involves building excellent, share-worthy content, tweaking, optimizing, and trying like crazy to help your customer base in whatever way you can.
At The Found Gen, we know the best ways to achieve this kind of content. And we also know your customers are just waiting for you to go there.