Fans are your greatest asset. They’ve chosen to follow you? That’s amazing. Whether they want to be passive or active fans, the choice to become a fan is a huge honor.

And yet I see so many pages not treating it as an honor and instead, treating their fans as people they can use. It’s maddening. And it starts with thinking they’re just there to have information pushed at them.

What does it look like when fans are talked at? And what about talking with them? What should you do? Let’s chat about it.

Talking at your fans

Talking at fans makes it all about the organization and not the fans. You’re only concerned with your needs and fulfilling them. Fans’ needs are secondary.

To the c-suite, this probably sounds about right. But to a fan? If they aren’t getting their needs fulfilled, they are going to move onto the next social media account that is concerned about those needs. Pages that know who their fans are and talk with them just provide a much better experience.

That is not to say that you should never be concerned about your organization’s needs when it comes to social media. That just shouldn’t be your entire plan or else social media just won’t work for you.

Talking with your fans

The more optimal plan is to create content that your fans want to talk about, and the only way to do that is to get to know who your fans are and what they like to talk about.

To be honest, this can be super simple. The super simple approach is taken by too many social media managers. Everyone loves memes, right? And made up holidays? And this is when social media starts getting a bad name. Instead of doing the hard work to figure out more interesting content that would connect with fans, these social media managers take a shortcut that gets them that quick engagement, but doesn’t look at business objectives at all. You could maybe keep that engagement up. But if there are no sales or donations as a result of these posts, why would you?

Somewhere in-between

It feels like most social media managers go to the extremes of these two approaches when the best is somewhere in-between. You can combine the content that is more like talking at your fans and turn it into talking with your fans.

So why doesn’t everyone do this? Because it’s significantly harder than the other two approaches and takes loads more time. And you have to get those in the c-suite on board for all of it, and even when they are, they can still get frustrated if the numbers go down temporarily as you test new tactics out. That is when so many brands opt out. They’d rather that quick engagement rather than a temporary dip that leads to sustained growth within your target audience.

Before you even attempt to move in this direction, you need to do as much education as possible. Be frank that you may experience a hit on engagement as you redirect towards a plan based on business objectives. If you were leaning too far towards talking with fans, you will likely lose fans. And you will definitely lose engagement. That’s just the nature of things when you course correct and not everyone likes what you’re doing.

But the good news is that if all you have been doing is talking at your fans, then you will slowly start seeing an uptick in fan engagement. Maybe not at first since the algorithm will have to be convinced you have changed (this is where some targeted ad dollars can really go far). But it will happen.

So many social media managers get stuck in an either/or approach when it comes to talking with or talking at fans. The reality is that it’s both. And once you recognize this and put all the pieces together, you will get to a great place.