Remember the classifieds? Long before Craigslist came along, people used to get their hands dirty shopping for everything from cars for sale to yard sales in their local classifieds section.
If you ever placed a classified ad, you should remember this drill; 20 characters for the headline, 50 characters for the body for about $25 bucks. Throw in a few more dollars if you wanted something bolded.
Point is, you could get your message out there to the masses for a relatively low cost, with just as equally low expectation that you would get any results. I mean, sometimes you did, most often you didn’t.
It all depended on your message and your offer!
Here is Philly, there was a guy who sold VCR’s (I bet there is someone reading this who has never seen a VCR in real life) in the classifieds for $50 in and around the various colleges in the area. His name Bruce. Call Bruce, pony up your half-a-yard, and you could watch all the movies you wanted in the comfort of your dorm room.
It worked so well, Bruce bought himself a huge mansion with a circular driveway. Then the taxman came, but that’s a different post for a different day.
What I am getting at is the fact that classifieds worked, for a long time!
Now turn the page to 2016
Last year sometime, I did a post on what my thoughts were on each of the social media platforms. Facebook was this, Instagram was that, and Twitter…Twitter was, to me, a PR platform.
It was a place for you to go and talk about yourself, insert yourself into the general conversation and engage. It was a way to introduce what you do to like-minded people and who knows, maybe do some business.
Now it seems like Twitter has become the new classifieds section of the web.
What you see now is a firehose of offers and solicitations, coupons and discounts and items for sale by everyone from car salesmen to insurance agents to construction marketing people, all hoping to gain your attention inside of 140 characters.
Now, all that might change once Twitter increases their character limit from 140 to 10,000. Then I predict you will have full-blown advertorials.
Not that any of this is bad, mind you. We all know social media is less about being social and more about ad buys. I’m just saying the social media marketing landscape is changing, and I am simply reminding you to make sure you pay attention to what these platforms become (and how to use them properly) in 2016.
