Recently, I had a meeting with a business owner regarding social media. I wasn't surprised to hear that they had a company doing it for them, but was surprised to hear how well they thought it was going. The business went on to tell me that they have thousands of followers on Twitter and hundreds of "friends" on Facebook. He was quite confident that their company was way ahead in the social media game. Of course, I was initially happy to hear that he felt it was working for him, but was curious about how well it really was going. I decided to do some research into their social tribe and see what they actually had accomplished in the local social media space. Here is what I found:
- The business had a personal Facebook page. The so-called social media company doing their social media management had set up the business a personal page. This is social media golden rule number one. Personal page for people and fan page for business. Not only is this against Facebook terms & conditions, but there are so many more benefits for a business to have a fan page that it isn't even worth it!
- "Broadcasting" seemed to be the strategy. After getting over the fact that this business was paying a company to violate Facebook policy for them, I started to read the posts. It was apparent that there was no strategy and no conversation. They were Broadcasting promotional offers, sales, and services. They were broadcasting so loud that they had left behind the "social" part of social media.
- Tweet...Tweet...Anyone out there?! The business did in fact have a few thousand twitter followers, but had no relevancy to the business. Probably 90% of their followers were from across the globe and not anywhere near the location of their store. Now, if they were building some relationships and connections with these people, it would be one thing. But, there was no engagement! Out of the 4,000+ followers they had, they were only following back "four". They were broadcasting about three times per month and none of it was engaging. There certainly was no evidence to me that they had been developing any type of relationships. It was apparent that they had no target market, no content roadmap, and a single strategy of being a spamming broadcaster.
What exactly was this company accomplishing with their social media. Who was this company being social with? How was social media helping their business? A few days later I went back to the business with their social media report card and asked them these same questions. They were certainly surprised to hear that they were violating Facebook policy and were spamming people on the other side of the world. The problem here was they were told that the metrics to measuring their success was the number of friends and followers their company had.
The purpose of social media is to be social. To become a thought leader in your industry and to listen and provide your community with valuable information. Ask questions and use the answers to help provide your customers what they want and need. In the case of a small retail store with no website and nothing to sell online the metrics of success in their social media campaign wasn't the quantity of their following. The proper metric would have been quality over quantity. Or how about measuring how active their community was and how willing they were to engage back and use their pages as a resource and possibly a hub for customer service support?
Who is in your social tribe? Are you a small local business owner tweeting to people on the other side of the world? If so, what for? What kind of conversations are you having with your online community? Are they talking back or are you just broadcasting to them? What would your social media report card say about your business?