The Best Social Media Strategy of All Time!

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I constantly run across blog posts, emails, and spam comments on the blog that promise to tell you the perfect strategy for getting a higher PageRank for your website, or more twitter followers, or a higher Klout score.

And the problem with all of these strategies is that they are faulty. They might results in a higher PageRank, or more twitter followers, or a higher Klout score, but they don’t have any effect at all on what really matters: impact.

And the fact that these “strategies” don’t change your impact is a big problem.

But unlike all of these scam artists, I actually do have the best social media strategy of all time. And because I’m a nice guy, I’m doing to give it to you for free.

Ready?

Here it is:

Do awesome work.

If you do awesome work, it doesn’t matter what keywords you use in the meta tags. People will respond to it.

If you do awesome work, it doesn’t matter what time you tweet about it. People will find it.

Here are the principles of the Do Awesome Work strategy:

  • There are no shortcuts. There. Are. No. Shortcuts. If you get twitter followers by following a bunch of random people so that they’ll follow you back, it doesn’t help you spread your ideas, because they don’t care about your ideas. I can’t say this enough – there are no shortcuts.
  • You have to do the work. Don’t follow your dreams, follow your effort. All genuine social media success is built on actually putting in the hard work.
  • Social media success without awesome work is a pyrrhic victory. Let’s say you do manage to get thousands of twitter followers and a high PageRank, and tons of people go to your site, only to find that the content sucks. Then what? Have you actually gained anything? No.

    You are much better off with a modest number of followers and so-so search results, but with great content. Because then people will engage with it, and you will have impact – and that’s what really matters.

Why can I give this idea away for free? Because the simple fact of the matter is that most people aren’t willing to put in the effort – they want the shortcut.

And that doesn’t do any of us any good.

I want you to do awesome work. Because then I can read it, and be inspired. And I can think about it, and build on it. And if we’re lucky, maybe we can do some awesome work together

So please, follow the best social media strategy of all time:

Do awesome work.

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Student and teacher of innovation - University of Queensland Business School - links to academic papers, twitter, and so on can be found here.

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Category: innovation strategy
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9 thoughts on “The Best Social Media Strategy of All Time!”

  1. It’s this kind of refreshing honesty that really shines a light on the ‘get rich quick through social media’ types. Shame so few want to hear the truth.

  2. I would tend to emphasize your second bullet point (“You have to do the work.”) Brilliant ideas mean nothing without the effort to put them into practice.

    I suppose this is another way of looking at the old business school point of view: ROI. You want to maximize your return on investment; naturally, this presupposes that you have sufficient investment upon which to maximize your return. These little schemes require little investment–in time, effort, or other resources–thus guaranteeing minimal return.

    • I think you’re right about low investment-low return Greg. The main issue here is that people often want to jump ahead in time to after they’ve done the hard work, so shortcuts seem appealing.

  3. PREACH IT.

    There is too much lowest common denominator thinking in the modern world. Stop trying to market cookie-cutter, also-ran mediocrity. Start making legitimately superior products in a sustainable fashion. Make it obvious WHY this product/service is important and WHY you or your organization are genuinely interested in making a difference in the world.

    Who gives a shit about how many followers anyone has. When I see self-proclaimed social media experts touting followers, friends, and likes, I think back to the conversations had on discussion forums TEN YEARS AGO around how “You are not your post count.” They’re not doing anything different.

    Shills. Hucksters. RAWR!

    Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.

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