Social networking is about human contact

The Gooder Group’s Real Estate Rainmaker website recently featured  17 Survival Tips For Facebook Marketing .

Two of them really stood out:

6. Focus on engagement, not Likes.

15. Never buy bulk Likes.

On Facebook and Twitter it’s easy to get caught up in statistics such as numbers of Likes or Followers, but you can have great stats and no sales. For the small business, social networks are all about human contact. A Facebook post by a loyal customer is just the tech version of good old fashioned word of mouth. (And somebody posting negatively is probably even worse than the old version if you don’t react. But fortunately, if handled politely and appropriately may be easier to recover from since it’s easier to track.)

So, if you’re not focusing on racking up the ReTweets, what should you be focused on?  Two things:

  1. Encouraging your loyal customers to recommend you
  2. Engaging with the online opinion leaders in your market

Unless your selling social networking, who matters much more than how many.

A check in with a positive comment from someone with an established reputation paints the picture you want to paint of your business and like a picture, it’s worth a thousand Likes.