1-17-2012
by Loyd Ford
Is your social media stuck in the early days or have you broken free to establish active participation with listeners based upon what excites them about your radio station, what they care about and what you stand for in 2012?
Here are four ways to increase your 2012 effectiveness in social media:
1. Take listeners into your backstage area. Ask yourself about the parts of your job that would be interesting to someone who works a ?regular job.? Give them a fun view of what it is to be in the entertainment business. This can be anything from a short feature on an afternoon talent to an inside interview with an artist or how you present the station at a concert. Listeners like fun. Put your fun out there and lead them back to your radio station.
2. Connect your social media, radio station and website. Listener?s lives are more complicated than you might think. We need to always make it easy for them. Make it easy for them to move between your social media, your website assets and on-air.
3. Ask questions. When you point your questions toward listeners, you hear much more than what you are promoting. You hear what is important to listeners. What?s the value of that?
4. Ask for the order. I always talk to stations about balance. It is important to make sure you balance content so that you are not simply only about your station, your promotion, your keys to what you want. However, at the end of the day, you cannot be afraid to ask for the order. The joy of providing balanced content and focusing on the listener is that you can ask them to become active for you when you need it. And they will respond. But that only happens if you have a great social media strategy, your team executes that plan and you are open to opening up to listeners.
So, open up?.and ask for the order. It is unlikely that you have the resources you had five years ago. At the same time, social media is so cost-friendly that stations, management and ownership can take it for granted or think they are deep in social media when they are actually only doing the basics. And doing the basics only in social media can be a killer. So, open up, have a plan, focus on listeners and ask for the order. It will make you more effective this year.
Loyd Ford programmed very successful radio brands in markets of all sizes for years, including KRMD AM & FM in Shreveport, WSSL and WMYI in Greenville, WKKT in Charlotte and WBEE in Rochester, NY. Learn more about Loyd here: http://about.me/loydford. Reach out to Loyd via e-mail HERE
Visit his Facebook radio social media page www.facebook.com/socialnetworking4radio
(1/17/2012 1:37:59 PM)
I think that these 4 points are well taken and make a lot of sense, however I feel there needs to be one more step. Radio stations need to address the mindsets of the generations that are the core of their listenership. To see what I mean, go to www.genergraphics.com and look for some of the ways radio can do this.
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