Social Media: Quality Over Quantity

By Yosef Solomon on Feb 23, 2010

One concept that grabbed my attention yesterday at a breakout session during Gravity Summit was the idea of quality over quantity in Social Media. Often times, we as social media professionals get hung up on the numbers. The amount of followers or fans can often be the metrics of success in Social Media valuations. But they shouldn’t be the only measure. Yes, the amount of followers and fans can give you insight into who’s listening and interacting with your brand, but in order to improve and grow you need to dig deeper.

What are your followers saying about your brand? How can you better interact with those die-hard fans and include them in future promotions? The understanding of “community” is huge here. It’s not about having 100,000 followers on Twitter, but more about what those followers are saying and how they’re responding (Retweets, Mentions, Sharing etc…)

Most of us get caught up in the numbers because that is what are clients ask of us. How fast can I get 50,000 followers on Twitter? I’ll pay you X amount to get my fan page to 5,000. These demands are inefficient and miss the point of Social Media. By taking this approach, you’re not only losing your voice, but also your authentic followers.

As we continue to move forward with Social Media and Social Networks, I think we’ll begin to see better techniques evolve and utilize sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Instead of just trying to grab followers and fans, companies will need to focus more on the content and distribution models. There are plenty of tutorials and lists out there that explain social media etiquette and how to get the most out of your followers. These are extremely helpful and need to be employed by brand strategists.

Quality over quantity basically comes down to playing by the rules and allowing your content to speak for itself. Making strategic alliances is also important and shouldn’t be overlooked. But simply spamming for more followers, fans and irrelevant links won’t help in the least.