Social media is not just for individuals. Increasingly, brands, products and media use social media to stay in touch with their audience, to introduce or promote new ideas or understand the pulse of a particular segment. Traditional media uses social media the same way you do. They use to look at YOU and your business before interviewing you.
- Media checks out all of your social media platforms to see how often you update, how relevant your updates are and to see how many followers you have. Media would like to engage someone with a larger following so that they can get cross promotion from the interview. Media knows you will want to share a link to the interview on your site. When your followers click the link, that media outlet benefits from this potential new viewer. A win-win for everyone.
- Media will notice if your social media platforms have a large amount of negative comments. This may make them uncomfortable using you as an expert. This is not a notice to start censoring all negative comments from these platforms. Everyone has negative comments on their social media. However, if these comments go unanswered or answered in an antagonizing or bitter way, media notices this too. It’s up to you to rectify these grievances and take a hard look at what is going wrong to cause so many upsetting comments.
- Media looks at who is following you. Maybe they want a certain group of followers you have or maybe they don’t want them. Either way, checking out your groupies can be useful to the media to get an idea of what you really stand for. This gives the media a better idea if you fit with their current philosophies.
Media by nature wants to snoop. That’s how we have local news every day. It’s mostly harmless and just an attempt to find out more about you. The same way you use social media is the same way media uses it. So don’t be surprised if media uses social media to do a little snooping on you.