Stop Asking for Pointless Actions on Social Media

Social media is a fickle beast. What worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. In the case of asking for social actions, it’s a trend that died a little while ago and likely will not return.

Anyone who has spent any time on social media has seen them. They’re ask people to do things such as “Like if you ______” or “Retweet if you _____”. If you’re Justin Bieber, you might be able to pull it off. If you’re a car dealer, stop doing it. Nobody is falling for manufactured engagement anymore.

The truth about finding success posting with automotive social media is this: be real. Be sincere. Don’t act interested in anything that doesn’t truly interest you. People aren’t stupid. They’ve been on social media for a while now and they’ve seen the engagement traps. Do you really care if someone likes the red or the orange car? If they’re at the dealership, of course it matters. If they’re on the smartphone surfing through their Tweets, you really have no interest in which color they like the most. This isn’t market research. It’s just a failed attempt to get people to engage with your posts based upon some poor advice from a self-proclaimed guru or a 2009 blog post on the subject. You don’t really care what they think.

They don’t really believe that you care what they think.

In the example above, the dealer asked for pointless actions. After nearly a day, it received no love. In case you think that it might just be because the account doesn’t have many followers, note that it was also retweeted by @AskPatty, an account with 14K followers. None of them cared and none of them believed that the dealership asking the question cared about the response, either.

If you’re shooting for engagement (and there’s an argument that says you really shouldn’t care about engagement, but we’ll save that for another blog post), then make a statement. People react to statements more than questions on social media, oddly enough. You can ask people which one they like, or you can tell them which one YOU like. Don’t make people choose between one action or another. To get engagement, make them agree or disagree by voicing your own opinion.

Do you see what I did there? Same photo. Instead of asking for meaningless actions, I made a statement. In this case, it happened that the school colors of the Oklahoma Sooners and Oklahoma State Cowboys were represented, so I played on it.

One does not have to be in Oklahoma to make something out of this image.

“Nothing wrong with the red one, but the orange just works for me. Stands out. #NothingRhymesWithOrange”.

Get conversation, aka engagement, by saying things that are interesting, not asking for actions from people who don’t care and who realize that you don’t care either. Bold, funny, interesting, controversial, and polarizing statements will get engagement. “Tweet bait” will not.