Is the "He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins" Philosophy to Social Media Really the Best Approach?

People spending any time studying how to be effective with social media, need to learn how to sift through the weeds. There are a lot of articles, posts and comments about obtaining as many likes, friends and followers as possible.

There are consultants who base their business solely on this one aspect. They never stop to think about the fact that those people may never be back to your Facebook page, or completely ignore you tweets, leaving you no value whatsoever in the “relationship.”

It reminds me of the bumper sticker he who dies with the most toys wins, only you can replace the word toys with likes, friends or followers. This is really not a good way to measure the success of your social media campaign. It only hits on a small sliver of what social media is about.

The fascination is similar to the obsession with obtaining as many web site hits as possible. Both only reveal a fraction of what you should be doing online. A web site hit is not going to do anything for you if they leave the site before completing your call to action.

You need to make sure that your site’s content, design and structure all work together to point at your call to action. Visitors who complete that call to action should be the true mark of success.

The same thing is true with social media. Say there is a Facebook page with 2,000 likes and a page with 20. The page with 2,000 likes has zero engagement. They do not talk with anyone through the page, and it is largely used as a PR mouthpiece to toss their traditional marketing materials against a wall and see what sticks.

Now, say the Facebook page with 20 likes takes the opposite approach. There is a community being built because they are asking questions, getting to know the people who liked their page, and have generally built their business. I’ll take this page every time.

Don’t get me wrong, if you can build a page with a large following and engage, and talk with people, it can work wonders. There are people out there extremely talented at doing just that. No matter the size of your network, you should be concentrating on engagement, though.

You can throw those traditional marketing measurements out the window. Instead of how many likes you want to establish in a given day, maybe try for how many conversations you want to start. How many people do you want to meaningfully talk to?
It’s a better way to aim for success with social media.

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