What Home Alone teaches you about social media marketing

I try to watch Home Alone every year when Christmas comes around. It’s a simple coming-of-age tale that is absolutely timeless, and it feels good every time I watch it.

There’s a famous scene in Home Alone when Macaulay Culkin is trying to keep the Wet Bandits away from his house by faking a party with a bunch of mannequins, loud music, and a cardboard standee of Michael Jordon attached to a train set. From the outside, it looks like there’s a lot of noise and activity, so the Wet Bandits decide to come back another day.

Honestly, this reminds me too much of a lot of corporate social media accounts. You’ll see a lot of posts going up very regularly, and there is always new content whenever you visit. But ring the doorbell or try to talk to someone, and you’ll realize that there is something really wrong with this party. Despite all the noise and excitement, there is a curious lack of interactivity.

With TV commercials, it’s great to have a large crowd gathering to see all the fuss. But with social media, you want people to talk and engage - and to do that, you have to listen and respond.

Nobody wants to go to a Macaulay Culkin party and have a one-sided conversation with a cardboard standee of Michael Jordon, but that’s exactly what so many corporate social media accounts offer. You can tweet them or comment on their Facebook page, but you’ll get nothing but silence in return… or an automated response that goes “Thank you for trying to talk to us. We’re too busy to respond right now, but please keep clicking Like and sharing our posts.”

When I worked at a luxury boutique hotel group, we wanted to emphasize our signature personal touch on our social media channels as well. That’s why I made it a point to always respond to comments on Facebook and Instagram, tweets, and, of course, those TripAdvisor reviews. All of them.

Luckily, we’re a niche boutique group, and the traffic isn’t as insane as that of huge brands, so it fits well with the famous Jerry Maguire mission statement: “Fewer clients, more truth.”

You’ll probably never be able to respond to 100% of your engagement, but the thought does count, and if you spend less time coming up with viral posts and devote some of that time to listening to your fans, you might not only make someone’s day, but maybe you might just end up doing something that makes your own day too.

I have to admit, after a while, the fan growth, impressions, and all those nice measurable KPIs lost their luster. Instead, I started feeling genuine pride about my work when I’d catch a random mention on social media and turn it into something special. I arranged for scheduling changes so that a couple can attend both a cooking class and a guided bicycle tour, had a surprise birthday message written on the world’s most beautiful beach for a fan’s wife, and sent a replacement book cover to a couple so that their treasured honeymoon memories of a private island paradise won’t be tarnished by a coffee stain.

It’s not exactly the kind of thing that will make upper management happy, but it made our guests happy, it made me happy, and if our brand logo had a face, I’m sure it would’ve smiled too.

And suddenly I no longer felt like a lonely little kid in an emotionally empty party.