Establishing First Impression on Social Media

When you first start to use social media for business, it may feel a little bit awkward or uncomfortable for you. However, just like anything else in life (personal as well as professional), social media helps you to establish relationships and subsequently to grow those relationships. 

Creating a lasting impression through social media

If you do it right, the first impression that you make on the other person is a lasting impression and it will serve as the material that allows you to form a relationship with the other person. The first impression that the other person gets of you is that your main interest is in figuring out a way to give the person what he or she wants and needs. In other words, you need to be able to solve the other person’s problems. It is the concept of “WIIFM” (What’s In It For Me?). That means that no matter how wonderful and knowledgeable you are and no matter how amazing your business and your offerings are, those things are secondary compared with your success at solving the other person’s problem. If you are not able to do that, there will not be any place to go with that. 

If you do manage to make a lasting first impression through social media, it will serve you very well. It will drive whether the other person continues to have a relationship with you and to continue to build that relationship to the point where the person becomes a loyal customer and tells other people about how amazing you, your business, and your brand are. In essence, you want the other person to create a viral atmosphere. Your lasting impression will mean that you will not only establish a relationship with the other person but that you will share an enduring relationship. 

How does a first impression work?

The funny thing about a first impression is exactly what they say,

When it comes to social media interactions, you have an even more limited window to create a lasting impression on the other person. One of the reasons that social media is so successful and popular is that, on the whole, people have very little time for anything and social media provides them with a clear, concise way to allow people to have meaningful interactions that compels them to keep interacting.

When it comes to ensuring that you make the first impression that you want to make, it is important to remember that you will have to work very hard to change that impression once it exists.

Another concept that is connected to the first impression is the very beginning of whatever content you are  posting and sharing. In that context, you have exactly 3 seconds to capture the attention of your reader. In essence, that is a form of a first impression as well. For as many social media channels that you have joined, it is important that you realize that you need to work each and every one of them (using your profile on all of those social media channels). Your connection with the people with whom you interact through social media will be very dependent on exactly which people you are targeting. Your social media profiles should not necessarily all sound the same. It all depends on whom you are trying to reach and that particular social media channel and how it functions.

The question that you may be asking yourself right now is, “How do you go about creating a great first impression?” Well, there are several different ways in which you can make that happen.

• Search for yourself and your business online: That is a really effective way to determine whether your content is bringing in the target audience that you wish to be drawn to you and to your business. If that isn’t happening in the way that you want it to and producing the results that you are looking for, you can make some changes that should help you to obtain the results that you want to achieve. Your goal is to have your social media connections appear at the top of the search engine page.

• Ensure that you share only the information that you want to share: It is extremely important that you have control over the information that other people are able to access. Of course, there is some information that you want to share with a large number of people and there is some information that you only wish to share with a small amount of people. It is entirely up to you what you share with whom. Those reasons are yours alone and it is totally your decision what you do with that information.

• Really make your social media accounts aesthetically appealing: It is critical to your success that you make your online connections wish to connect with you through social media. You can make that happen in a few different ways. One of those ways is by making your presence on social media look really attractive to other people. If you do that, other people will pay attention to what you are saying and to what you are selling. With most things in life, if the person or thing is attractive, that is the first impression that the other person will get and it is an impression that they will not forget easily. 

Conclusion

Because of the fact that people are going to be visiting your social media profiles, pages, etc, it is important to pay attention to what is happening at all times and to make sure that you do status updates on a very regular basis (although not too often). Additionally, it is very important to always provide fresh, timely, appropriate content that you will post on your social media pages. However, it is important to realize that creating a positive first impression doesn’t actually mean that your work is done. In fact in some ways, it is only beginning. You will still need to put important and interesting details into your social media profiles that will draw other people to you. Remember to communicate clearly and in a way that is memorable to the people online with whom you are sharing your content.

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