taken from The Rules of Social Media BY FAST COMPANY STAFF | AUGUST 24, 2012
#TheRules of Social Media: Don’t Make People Do X, Y, Then Z. Stick With X
How do you engage your audience? Keep it simple and promote great content, says GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold.
“The most successful social media companies are the simplest ones you can think of,” says Alex Iskold, CEO of the entertainment social network GetGlue.
“Complexity doesn’t really work in social media. People are trying to create this social engagement and turn it into this multi-tiered, multilevel challenge to get people to do X,Y,Z,” says Iskold. “The simplest things on GetGlue and Twitter and Facebook are spreading some kind of viral content through the existing social circuit. The best videos on YouTube go viral because people like them.”
Simplicity is an important part of the equation. So is quality content and quality product.
“All of these successful things have one thing in common: they have interesting content that then travels through the social Web,” Iskold says. “If you look at the shows that are popular on Get Glue, they’re all great shows. No matter what you do, if they’re not great, people are not going to watch. Same thing with products.”
“You can’t really buy a like,” Iskold says. “That’s really an old-fashioned email-harvesting model. What’s the point? If someone wants to engage with the brand, you have to facilitate that, instead of just saying ‘let’s go buy some likes.’”
Check out our crowdsourced guide: #TheRules of Social Media.
