Social Media Mistake #2

Dr. Barnes shares the second social media mistake that many business leaders often make. When business leaders make this mistake, trust cannot be built between a brand or business and its social media followers. Dr. Barnes explains how business leaders can avoid this mistake and instead build trust so social media followers engage with a brand or business. This episode is based on Dr. Barnes' book "5 Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid." 

Transcription:

Welcome to the Bricks 2 Clicks Marketing podcast. If you're a small business owner and you struggle to market your business, this podcast is just for you. I'm your host, James Barnes. And thank you for listening today.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. In season one, we're talking about five social media mistakes your business should avoid. It's based on a book I wrote, it's on Amazon and Kindle, and I just want to carve out a little bit more content about this second mistake, mistake number two, that so many companies make in their social media marketing. And here it is: they don't use enough empathy. Empathy tells your customer that you understand the problem that they have and expressed in a way that's genuine. And remember, we were talking about it in the last episode, we talked about problem and loss and how we need to be talking to our customers about the problem they have and the losses they'll continue to experience if they don't solve the problem. And that helps us also then pivot to saying, "We understand it; we get it."

And that is empathy. That's the basic foundation for starting to connect with your customer. You understand the problem and loss. Now you're in a position where you can express empathy, and this is not a place where you fake it. You really do need to have genuine empathy. You really understand that the problem that your customers have, you've experienced their problem. You've made a business out of helping people get out of that problem and find solutions, which is what you sell. And so you want to be genuine, but you want to be using empathy.

And I want to go back to my example from the last episode about the billboard. As I was driving down the road many years ago in Louisiana, I saw a billboard, one of the best ads I've ever seen to date. And at the top of it just said, "Gambling problem?" And then it said, "You could lose this." And then next to that statement, it had a silhouette of a family. So it captured the whole idea of problem-loss very, very quickly. And remember, the problem is the hook and the loss makes us feel, look, I'm going to have to do something about this. I don't want to experience loss. There's a great deal of behavioral economics that support that whole idea of how we act to avoid losses. And I'm not going to go into all the stuff here about that, but problem and loss are there in that billboard. And the next statement is one of the most powerful things they said, and it was really simple. And it simply said underneath, "We can help." That may sound really overly simplistic. "All right, that's it, James? That's all they said?" Yeah. That's enough.

When you tell your customers you understand the problem they have, you understand the losses they're going to experience or have been experiencing, and that you understand it and we can help, it's just therapy. I mean, it really is. I mean, think back in your life, when you had someone to listen to you, and maybe it wasn't a therapist, just a good friend who was a good listener. And he said, "Look, I'm struggling with this." And your friend said, "Okay, tell me about it." And you just unloaded and you got all that out. They listened and they said, "Man, that's a really tough thing you're going through. I get it. I can see why you'd be struggling." That's the kind of stuff that you want to be doing with your customers. You want to