Your Played Out Social Media is Creating Boring Relationships

Over-Exposed

The other night I went out for drinks with an old friend. We hadn’t seen each other in a while and we were looking forward to catching up. Now that we live in different cities, we don’t have the opportunity to hang out as often as we would like.

Between our work life, family life and personal hobbies – you’d think we would have plenty to talk about. Surprisingly, we didn’t.

As we told each other stories, one of us would inevitably interrupt the other with “Oh yeah, I saw that on Facebook.” or “I know, that picture you posted on Instagram was awesome!”

We stared at each other with beers in our hands, and I wondered: What can I tell you that you don’t already know?

 Judging by her silence, she must have been asking herself the same exact question.

After a while we started talking about more in-depth, personal stories that you typically don’t post on social media. Had this not been a good friend of mine, however, the conversation would have quickly ended.

I find the situation a little ironic. Why is an online platform designed to create social interactions hurting my relationships?

I thought about it for a while and realized the answer. We are both overexposed.

It’s like when a movie trailer shows all the good parts. There’s a lot of build up and excitement, but when you finally go to the theater to watch the movie the end result is disappointment.

My life on social media is like a poorly made movie trailer. I’m putting my life’s greatest stories and adventures on the Internet for the world to see, so when I actually get together with someone in real life I have little left to share. Instead, I end up telling the same few stories that they’ve already heard or seen elsewhere.

Where’s the mystery? Where’s the intrigue?

I think the same exact phenomenon is happening to our businesses.

We live in this marketing era where we put everything about our company on the Internet for all of our customers and potential customers to see. We explain every service, tell every customer story, share every event, boast about every single award and business accolade, promote every sale and discount and talk about the same handful of topics over, and over and over again.

Then finally, when we do get in front of our audience, we regurgitate the same stories that they've already heard. We show them the same feature list, tell them the same client success stories, and show the same info-graphics – until there is not much left to talk about.

And after a while, people get sick of hearing the same thing and they will eventually ignore, unsubscribe, or block your content.

I’m a huge fan of Internet Marketing for obvious reasons – after all, I run a digital agency.

But I’m not a big fan of bombarding our audience with useless information so that in the end, we have absolutely nothing to talk about.

I think we need to look at our social media content sharing approach with fresh eyes. After all, we know a little mystery and intrigue is bound to spice up any relationship – and I believe this technique will work for our businesses, too.

As you create and develop relationships with your leads and customers through content marketing and engagement, don’t give away your whole story.

Instead, share just enough relevant content to engage your audience and pique their interest. Their curiosity will drive them to contact you to find out more – and when they do, you will have something great to talk about.

So here’s to adding a little more spice and intrigue to our business and our personal lives – we all know we could use it!