Social Media: Wasting Time

Many radio stations view their social media strategy (if they even have one) as part of the value-added bonus they can offer advertisers.

"Plus, we'll talk about your sale on our Facebook page!"

Those few stations that seem to actually think about using social media as more than this still tend to view it with the same short-term mindset they bring to advertising campaigns.

"If we do this (on Twitter, Facebook, personality blog) how many (page views, clicks, sales, customers) will we get and how soon? Because we need it right away. Like tomorrow. Or next week. Otherwise we can't (monetize) it." *

The whole point of social media is to deepen the engagement your station has with the listeners who are most involved with it.

We should feel fortunate that many of our listeners, despite the busy-ness of life, still want conversations with us, still want a personal connection with our talent, and are still eager to give us feedback on just about everything we do.

Unfortunately for us, we live in times when the business part of our business expects an instant correlation between spending and results.

This same type of short-term thinking is one of the reasons radio advertising is where it is. We've focused more on getting business on the books right now than creating marketing solutions for our clients.

Luckily, not every company is like this. I happen to work with one that is not only spending money on their social media connections, but is actually thinking about what radio will look like 10 years from now, and what they have to do now to be there, when there is here.

You would never think of meeting someone and immediately saying, "Look, if you're not going to spend some money with me, you're a waste of my time."

So why is that acceptable behavior, an acceptable expectation, with your social media?

* Edward Boches, Creatvity Un_Bound