Too Many People Focused On Social Networking Numbers And Selling To An Audience

Seriously people, social networking is not just about numbers of fans and followers. Yes, of course you want to see growth in the number of “Likers” and “Followers” but if you just focus on this then your audience will be worthless.

When I mange social networking campaigns I focus on clean lists, rather than strength in numbers. Unless your brand is Coke or Home Depot, numbers are not what you should be seeking out. What you absolutely should be focused on is the number of likes that your posts get and the number of impressions that they receive in the news feed.

Seek Out Quality Interactions
Most brands should only be seeking out followers and fans that are in their industry. This will ensure that your lists are clean. Try to write status updates that only encourage interaction. If your audience is not interacting, you are wasting your time and you are just posting noise. Ask the audience questions that they will want to answer, get their opinions, be real and honest, not fake and scripted. Fake and scripted will always appear that way.

Don’t Use It As A Sales Tool
Social networking is not a sales tool. Have a tab on your fan page that sells your products, but don’t overwhelm your audience with plugs for buying your products. After a while this will destroy your impact. People on facebook don’t want to be sold, they want real and true interactions. If you really want to piss you off your audience just right FU, we don’t care about our audience. It will have the same impact as using facebook as a sales tool.

Avoid Too Many Status Updates
Try your best to avoid status updates more than once per day. The rise of mobile devices has made multiple updates per day from one source extremely annoying to people who check facebook or twitter on their smart phones. If you have two status updates in the same scroll on my phone I am highly likely to block you and never see one of your updates ever again.
It is not just mobile phone users that you will piss off by posting too many status updates for your brands. Bottom line, you do not want to alienate the people that love your brands. Treat them with respect and dignity and don’t just blast something out to them for the sake of blasting it out. Each status update is a unique opportunity to reach your audience and create relationships that move out of social networking and into the real world.

Watch Who You Make An Admin
This is crucial to any social networking program. You have worked hard getting every single one of your fans to click that famous LIKE button. All it takes is one wrong person in your company or organization to become an Admin to your Facebook fan page to deathly destroy all of your hard work. Make sure that anyone who is an admin is well versed in the importance of not selling directly with your facebook status updates. Hopefully for you, your company or organization appreciates that you are a student of this new media and trusts your opinions or your social campaigns will all fail, and fail hard.

Use the Nav Bar To Sell
You can sell your audience subtlety on facebook without pissing them off. Use apps to create customized nav bars promoting your products and services. If they are on your page they will find them.

Share/Bookmark

This entry was posted on February 9, 2011 at 10:13 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Social Networking by admin No Comments Yet