Getting the most Facebook likes is not a social media strategy

When writing my last blog - Make sure your social media is value add, we started looking at some ways to use social media, and how a social media strategy can be formulated.

It occurred to me that for some company’s and marketing managers, they judge the success of their social media strategy by the numbers – and let’s face it, Social media can be a numbers game. There are some questionable company’s out there who “sell” you fans so within a week you can have a likes – but these are computer generated email addresses and really doesn’t push customer engagement or help your brand.

The only one way I can think of where buying likes would have any affect is if a competitor quickly looks at your page and is impressed by the numbers. But buying fans and likes – you’ll soon be found out. There will be no engagement, not comments or ongoing dialogue and most likely the social media platform itself won’t be updated regularly as there is no need to post updated to fake fans.

So - who has the most likes, followers, fans etc….When putting together a social media strategy for your business, it needs to be more about the numbers.

Say one of your business goals is to always give customers a positive experience when dealing with your customer service. The objective therefore could be to reduce overall call waiting time when calling your hotline. A social media strategy to help achieve this could be to tell customers while on hold to contact you on Facebook or via Twitter and you will get back to them instead of them waiting on hold. Customer service satisfaction is a great use of social media.

Another business goal could be to grow your business to open another 10 franchisees over the next two months. So, your objective would be to attract new franchisee holders to the business. How can a solid media strategy help? What’s the first thing any potential investor or franchisee holder is going to do? Research you online. So you social media strategy could be to create a thought leadership program in your industry using social media – providing expert industry comment and building up your credibility and reputation within the industry.

Social media is about engagement – not numbers
In its rawest form, social media was developed as a communication tool – as a way for people to share, engage and enjoy – the early social media platforms at least. But social media has grown to become an important business tool – fundamentally, businesses need to conform with the original goal of social media – engagement and interaction.

Use your social media strategy to engage customers, interact with them, share what interests you and information that may be important to them. That’s how you’ll grow you a loyal fan base who are interacting with your brand – not just numbers of the sake of bragging rights.