Social Media for architects

CIA’s first ever tweet on Twitter, a great example of entry into the social media.

We have all heard at one time or another that you can use social media to sell and I want to explain why this is not true. Social media must serve for us to tell our stories, to make our products known, our work, our good expertise, something that we architects have a lot of. But we need to be mindful of the following simple concepts.

TRANSPARENCY

The world of Social Media is a world of to knowledge. Social media enables us to generate an opinion on something and disseminate it. Social media is not about the buying phase, although in order to buy something, you must first know about it, and if nobody knows your brand, you won’t be able to sell.

THE MYTH OF GENERATING COMMUNITY

The wildly dynamic social media entail continuous re-adaptation. What used to cover us with glory quickly becomes void and absurd.  We have our clearest example in the great social network:  its change of policy for showing content lead many people who had entrusted Facebook with their information will blow up in its face. This is important because in social media, it’s not about having the greatest number of followers. It’s rather about getting your message where it needs to go. It’s useless to have a million followers if only 30 are talking about your content.

CONTENT IS THE KING

We should forget about size, i.e. the number of followers, mattering. That’s not the issue, least of all when it can be bought. And brands, celebrities and professionals do that. There are a host of sites for that. And yet this is not what makes us relevant.¹ It’s about generating the best content and, what’s more, generating interactive content enriched by the opinions of the users themselves. Doing this will enable us to evolve much better on the Internet and discover ourselves by ourselves just as our potential users would discover us.

SENSE OF HUMOUR

We have just determined that content is most important. So, how should it be conveyed in that environment? This is where sense of humour comes in. It’s not about telling jokes our being the funny guy in the class, but rather about perfectly knowing our product and ourselves and being able to convey it with a sense of humour when we broadcast the message.

The cover image of this post, the CIA’s first tweet, stands as a perfect example: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this our first tweet –“²

HOW MANY SOCIAL MEDIA YOU NEED TO BE ON

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google +, Linkedin,… You can’t be on each and every one of them. We have to find out which are the best for us and, as we are architects, we can avail ourselves of the ones with the most visual content. Being on different social networks is about interacting, publishing and disseminating content, and not about merely opening a profile, which we must do come what may, particularly to prevent others from using our brands illicitly.

I’d like to encourage you to use the space for comments on this post to ask any questions you may have about the social media. And of course, to comment on any experiences you may have had as well.

Text translated by Beth Gelb