The Ghost Town: A Social Media Story

It’s so easy to start a blog that nearly everyone does it. It only takes a couple of minutes to create a YouTube account and upload a video. Opening a Twitter account doesn’t cost money, so there are thousands of names taken each day. The same goes for Facebook causes, Ning social networks, and dozens of other popular outlets.

It’s easy to get started, so what’s stopping you?

The result is thousands of empty blogs, abandoned YouTube channels, dead Twitter accounts… I find them all the time. It’s heart-breaking.

It’s obvious why this happens: we’re too busy. Too busy to write posts for our blogs and find valuable content to share via Twitter. We have more important things to do.

It’s easy to get started, but it’s really hard to keep going. They don’t tell you that on the sign-up pages. YouTube won’t help you find supporters unless you put videos in there. Good videos. Twitter won’t gather and inform your followers unless you’re posting updates.

Marketing is often one of the first things to fall when we get too busy – it’s expensive and time-consuming and the payoffs are not always immediate. Social media is even worse. It requires a lot more time investment to get results and can be very intimidating.

Social media is no different from any other marketing outlet: it is a vehicle to tell your story to a certain audience in a certain way. That’s it. Like organizations who publish their first and only newsletter—or groups who buy TV ads with no call to action—marketing is about getting people to take action. And that always requires you to take action first.

Want to comment? Send me a note on Twitter or email me.