Book Excerpt: You don’t need a million friends

social_media_3dThe following is an excerpt from 42 Rules of Social Media for Small Business by Jennifer Jacobson.

Defining your goals is an important part of any business campaign, whether online or offline. It is important to define your social media goals and ask yourself if you want millions of online followers, or a select group of online friends who will gladly do business with you. While having millions of friends on your Facebook page or millions of followers on Twitter may sound appealing, it’s not always a realistic goal, and it may even be counterproductive to your business’s social media efforts.

Imagine you won the lottery and you could have any amount of cash you desired. How much money would you ask for? Chances are you’d want millions, possibly billions, of dollars. Considering the government bailouts that have recently been circulated, you might even ask for trillions. In reality, what we claim to want and what we would be comfortable with can be two very different things.

Let’s take a look at what can happen when we get what we wish for. An individual given millions of dollars suddenly has a new set of concerns and questions. Who will inherit the money when they die? How will they spend their money? Will they donate any of it to charity? How will they keep their money safe? Do people like them because they are rich or do they like them because of who they are? Sometimes, as many good stories teach, getting what you wish for isn’t
really in your best interest.

Social media is very much the same; while many people say they want
a million friends, it wouldn’t meet their business needs or goals. First of
all, if all of these friends decided to visit your company’s website, could
your servers handle a million hits? Second, real friendships are more
than a shout out. People who are the most valuable to your business’s
social media efforts are actively communicating, commenting, posting
pictures, and videos, and learning about your product with the intent of
doing business with you either now or in the future. Do you have the
capacity to communicate with a million people like this?

Take, for example, these thoughts on the importance of strategically
socializing, as opposed to the spray and pray spam method. Susan
Gunelis, President and CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc. says, “Social
media is the key to brand-building these days. People are online and
it’s the perfect place to connect with them. More people are influenced
by blogs and online relationships than by traditional media.”
“My favorite social media story comes from Universal Studios in
Orlando, Florida,” Susan says. “In 2007, with a virtually limitless
budget, the marketing exec at Universal was tasked with announcing
and promoting the new Harry Potter theme park that would open in the
coming years. To spread the word, she didn’t turn to traditional advertising.

At the risk of being fired for her out-of-the-box approach, she
announced a webcast to just seven people who were also popular
Harry Potter bloggers. The webcast required a password that only
those seven people had. During the webcast, she revealed the news
of the upcoming Harry Potter theme park and, within twenty-four hours,
there were hundreds of thousands of Web searches for the Harry
Potter theme park. From zero to nearly one million people within !
twenty-four hours. Now that’s the power of social media!”

Your social media efforts will be much more effective if you set goals.
Unless you’re selling ad space on your social media page, it doesn’t
matter if you have a million friends. It just matters that you have the
right friends; friends who will promote your brand, and do business with
you. For most small businesses, it is better and more realistic to
maintain the friends they have and look for qualified potential social
media friends. Try to connect with businesses and companies that you
have done business with and let your network grow from there.