There’s More to Social Media Than Sales

Everybody knows that, if you want to build a solid social media community for your business, you should be posting about all kinds of things–not just yourself or your products and services. Self-promotion is fine, of course. It’s even expected. It simply shouldn’t be the only thing you do with your feeds. So what else are you supposed to post about? What other behaviors should you encourage from your community besides sales?

When it comes to social media management, there are ways to work with your audience that have nothing–at least nothing overt–to do with sales. Let’s take a look at a few of the most popular ways you can energize and motivate your community to act.

Giving Back

Adopt a charity or two and encourage your community to support that charity. For example, Make Every Mile Count is an event organized by the Eve Appeal and promoted on social media. The group has used the event to raise money to help prevent gynecological cancers and since they brought social media marketing into their mix they’ve increased their numbers exponentially.

There are a lot of ways to use social media to drive attention and support to good causes. One of the simplest is to set up a crowd funding page for your favorite local non-profit and then promote that page to your social media audiences. They can give what they can afford when it is convenient for them and you help raise awareness for a local cause you care about.

Another option is to set up an event and to use your social media clout to promote that event to help improve its success.

Save the Planet

Saving the planet is more important today than it has ever been before. Based on the way global politicians are behaving, reducing carbon emissions and keeping the planet healthy is up to individual citizens, not larger companies or governmental agencies.

The good news is that, with social media, you can help your favorite planet-saving organization or effort go viral. According to Nature World News:

“At present, environmental issues has [sic] also began surfacing in social media. Different non-governmental and volunteer groups use the wide connections of social media to publicize and spread their goals. Many governmental laws and resolutions have been criticized in social media, forcing authorities to reconsider their actions. According to a report by Huffington Post, social media has been widely accepted by the environmental sector. They use social media to connect people locally and cross-nationally on major environmental issues such as climate change. However, not everyone in social media share the same cause. The perfect example of this is the current division between those who believe that climate change is real and those who deny climate change.”

Posting educational articles and promoting events that support your favorite environmental cause are a great way to let your social media audience know where you stand on green issues and encourage them to help save the planet!

Politics

2016 and 2017 have been amazing years for politics on social media. Whatever your political leaning, you likely found like-minded support for your causes and candidates online.

The biggest and best example of how social media can be used to promote a political cause is The Women’s March. What started as a personal project for one woman quickly grew into a nationwide event in which millions of people took part. Even if you do not agree with the philosophy behind the Women’s March, it is the perfect example of how social media can and should be used to raise awareness, to help organize and to promote political causes.

Social media is also a great way to connect with your local officials and government. Use your own feeds to lend your support to your local city councils, county issues, etc. You can pledge support or sponsor a candidate, facilitate a community improvement project, etc and promote all of it using your social media feeds.

These are just three of the ways that you can use your social media feed for more than self promotion. What’s your favorite non-self-promotional technique?