Social Media is a Vehicle, not a Destination

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Where are you going with your social media efforts? If you can’t answer this question with confidence, then this article is for you.

These days, most brands and businesses realize the importance of having a social presence: we know that we should “be on” Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but we’re not quite sure where these efforts are going. All too often, we treat social media as a destination— an end in itself— rather than a vehicle—a medium that will carry us towards larger business goals.

Too many times I’ve sat down with a client only to have him tell me he’d like “thousands of Twitter followers” and “hundreds of new Facebook fans.” With few metric systems offered for measuring social media, it’s easy to get suckered into a numbers game where we start to measure the value of our brand’s social presence in terms of the size of its following.

To counter this thinking, I always pose a simple question to my number-hungry client: Which would you rather have: Two thousand followers who could care less about you, or two hundred followers who will share your content, recommend your brand, and purchase your product or services?

Of course, they always choose the latter, and from there I go on to make my speech about quality rather than quantity when it comes to fans. You want quality (read: engaged/active/ invested) followers rather than people who just click “like” on your Facebook page and never have anything to do with you again.

At Going Social, we lay out social media goals for your business so that you’re not wasting your time. We’ll direct your social media efforts towards clearly defined goals so that you can determine and measure success on your own terms.