Have you been asking whether you really need more Facebook Fans or Twitter Followers? The answer shouldn’t surprise you. By expanding further into social networks, people get to see sides of you that are more personal and people love doing business with their friends. Making connections on a personal level, whether through business associates, or friends, will help
people start seeing a more personable side of you that they would not have seen before. Engaging on a personal level is beneficial to any relationship.
The advantage to building these types of connections is to get more people engaged in the business that you are offering. Does it really matter though how many fans you have on Facebook or “likes?” This becomes insignificant if you are just building numbers which becomes useless if these numbers don’t turn into customers.
There aren’t a lot of statistics that show that social media will have any direct effectiveness on sales, even with loyalty amongst your already existing customers, whether looking for any offers or discounts that you have offered to them. However, businesses cannot ignore the social media aspect of creating more business. Networking comes into play with Facebook and Twitter. Your friend or associate might not be interested in what you are selling, but by networking on these social media sites you might get business from others. Uninterested customers will still spread information through the social media highway like wildfire and this may lead to potential customers.
Now, some businesses have fallen prey to the paid Like or paid Twitter Follower trap. Such businesses have tested the pay-for-fans scheme and have come to the conclusion that it was all junk to them and didn’t do anything for their business. Their page attracted people to their site, but those that were brought in were simply not the right people. These types of people weren’t interested in the business that was being offered to them. The smaller businesses paying for these services, concluding that is wasn’t working for them. Did their test fail, because they didn’t choose the demographics like that wanted or were they just throwing out groups that they wanted to entice, but had no interest in their company? It certainly sounds like the latter.
So is it more important to pay for fans or try to slog at it the hard way by starting with your friends and hope for a ripple effect? Does it offend you that there are companies out there which make money from driving fans to businesses or does it just make good economic sense?
It probably doesn’t matter because the answer is both personal and murky. If you want a more local and friendly feel to your company, then paying for fans from thousands of miles away makes no sense. But if you want to go global or stick with trends, then this may make sense for you. It’s up to you and only you can figure out whether choosing the paid route is the right idea. On the other hand, having a killer social media management team working on your behalf to attract quality fans and followers sure sounds like a better plan, right?