A quick note. Posting day after day is a lot harder than I thought. I don’t want to put up a post just to put up a post and I want to keep the information useful. Your feedback helps me do this so please leave a comment and let me know what you’ve learned and what you’d like to see in the remaining 20 days.
Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Yelp and the list goes on, and on, and on. Social websites have become a huge part of our lives. Most people that chose to engage with others through in this fashion tend to find one form that they like and make that their primary channel. Those that tweet are often less active on facebook. Many professionals focus their time on LinkedIn and think that twitter is for the silly people.
If you’re running a small business you may struggle with social media for a few reasons. Where do you focus your time and energy? What site is the right fit for your company? Does more fans or followers mean more money? This post is about the last question.
Quality Vs. Quantity
If you own a company or manage a brand you should probably have a Facebook Fan Page (I’ll cover the difference between a Fan Page and a Profile in a later post). Once you’ve set up a page it’s normal to become preoccupied with watching the number of ‘fans’ you have. My friends down at Social Media Examiner have over 27,000 fans. I have less than 300. By themselves neither of these numbers mean anything. There have been a lot of companies talking about the ‘value of a fan’ on facebook. I think this is a huge misunderstanding of the purpose of the fan page. The purpose is not to collect it is to connect. Any business should be happy to have 100 engaged fans who interact, share and participate rather than 10,000 fans who don’t follow the page or promote the brand.
The same thing goes for Twitter. So often people focus on increasing the number of followers when they should be focusing on engaging the followers they have. Social media is not about being big. Social media is about engaging the few. Social media makes business more personal.
Bad Example – Recently I was having issues with one of my vendors (name withheld) and could not get through to them on the phone. They have a twitter account so I sent them a few messages there and never ever received a response. If you are not going to engage your customers on Twitter it is better to not have an account.
Good Example – A while back I needed a part for my faucet and went to Home Depot to see if I could find the part. I was test driving Four Square a the time so I posted that I was at Home Depot and could not find the part I was looking for. I was surprised that a short time later I had a message from Home Depot via Twitter offering to help. I also had a friend that works at Home Depot offer to help.
Chose which social media channels you want to use to actively engage your customers and then focus on the connections and the numbers will happen.
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