Making The Comparison Between Social Media And Gardening

Last year my wife and I decided to plant a vegetable garden for the first time and never having done this before we just dove right in and started planting a bunch of seeds hoping for the best. We made a lot of mistakes, had some fun and in the end we had some fresh vegetables to serve for dinner.

Seeing as this upcoming weekend and weather co-operating my wife and I will be out planting the garden and as we intend to not repeat the same mistakes as last year we will be taking a different approach to the whole operation.

You’ve probably begun to question how anyone could compare social media and gardening in any meaningful way but I will attempt to do just that with the following 6 ways I think that social media compares to gardening.

1. Planning, research and preparedness – One of the first mistakes we made last year was not researching or planning the garden and this resulted in some of our vegetables not growing properly or not growing at all.
   In order to be successful in social media you need to research where your target audience can be found, plan out your social media strategy and determine the goals you want to measure and you have to prepare a social media policy that will guide your entire company towards achieving the organizations goals.
2. Planting – When it comes to gardening you need to plant a seed in order to grow the vegetable.
   We can look at social media in much the same way, but with social media the “planting” will actually be the creation of your high quality, well produced content that will attract and retain the attention of your desired audience.
3. Watering – In order for this year’s crop of vegetables to go from so-so to extraordinary the garden has to be cared for and this includes watering.
   In order to gain traction using social media you have to “water” your content to ensure that it grows into a bumper crop of traffic or sales or new followers. Your “watering” will include sending it to your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, uploading it to YouTube, sharing it on the social bookmarking sites and whatever other strategies you have come up with to get your content in front of your target audience.
4. Weeding – No matter how careful we plant our garden this year it’s inevitable we’ll be out there at some point during the growing season to remove any of the weeds that will be attempting to take over and destroy all the hard work we’ve put forth.
   In social media you will find that no matter how carefully you have crafted your content you’ll still have to do your own amount of weeding. You can accomplish this by monitoring your brand for any negative sentiment and then quickly targeting and zeroing in on the issue and correcting it before it becomes a catastrophe.
5. Patience – I know that even though I’ll be planting a carrot seed on Saturday there’s no way I’ll be pulling a carrot from the ground on Sunday. I will have to exhibit patience and wait out the growing season before enjoying the fresh produce my garden will yield.
   There is no such thing as a quick fix and this includes social media and anyone who claims that social media success can be had overnight is either uninformed or lying to your face. After you’ve followed the appropriate steps of planning, preparing, setting goals, creating, distributing, turning negative sentiment positive or neutral you will have to exhibit patience as you continue repeating this cycle over and over until reaching your goals.
6. Harvesting – After all the hard work and patience needed during the growing season the payoff is finally here as we are able to harvest the vegetables in our garden and enjoy them during a nice family meal.
   Unfortunately in social media even after you’ve begun to achieve some of your goals and the harvest of your hard work and patience is coming to fruition you don’t get to sit back and enjoy but instead it’s now time to craft and create new goals and objectives and repeat the entire cycle.

Flickr Photo Courtesy Of anslatadams