Last year, I had an overwhelming 500 friends on my Facebook account. Most of whom, I had not talked to in 20 years, had only met once, knew of through friends of friends or met strangely enough only online. I decided to stop spreading myself thin and to nurture the friendships that really mattered to me most. I decided to delete over 250 Facebook friends.
Lately, I found the same rule could be applied to businesses.
Clients often ask for a social media strategy that increases the number of their followers on Facebook and Twitter overnight. Not only is this demand unrealistic, but it is also the least important when establishing initial goals for social media marketing. I’m sure you’ve heard, ‘it’s the quality, not the quantity that matters.’ Even with this age-old adage, there are people out there who think becoming popular prematurely is the way to go. For those folks, there are services catered to selling fast followers via Facebook and Twitter by the thousands! But this is exactly what’s wrong with social media today. Unbeknownst to these businesses, they have become followers themselves to an illusory trend and are responsible for inflating the real worth of social media by putting value on low-grade content and connections.
At the present moment, most social media programs engage in very superficial activities. Instead of gaining real lasting relationships, businesses measure their social media success off the sheer number of followers they accumulate on Facebook (whether real or fictitious) and the number of re-tweets they gain per day on Twitter. But the question is: Do these actions truly bring in real business? Do these followers possess real relevance to their business? The likely answer is: Probably not.
Being a business does not mean you have to conduct your social media strategy like a popularity contest. What social media can do for you is create a platform that brings together like-minded industry people and potential customers to talk about relevant issues. Social media is a place where communities share problems and solutions and develop relationships based on trust and value. What social media can do is encourage relationships for businesses that can be both personal and professional.
Encouraging high-quality relationships is simple, businesses just need to put aside their quest for popularity and instead integrate the motto that ‘less is more.’ Because (I’m sure you are all aware of this ) having 3 solid friends is much more gratifying than having 30 superficial friends. To put it quite simply, real business can only stem out of real relationships.