Just as turnover is vanity but profit is sanity, the same goes for your online presence.
Doing lots of stuff online through social media and having many connections means nothing if it doesn’t actually help your business in any way – in fact it could do the opposite if you have confusing messages.
There is this misleading view that as you are always on Twitter or have lots of likes for a LinkedIn post it’s good for business, but it actually may not be.
You can feel you are working productively by being busy on social media, just like delivering lots of leaflets may feel constructive to get a message across. But if the connections you make online are high in number but poor quality, it’s a waste of time and you become a busy fool.
Also familiarity breeds contempt – telling people too much can actually put people off.
Can a website video pay for itself? This blog post explains it depends on what you sell and how.
It’s the same with the number of views a video gets. Some of my customers want their video to ‘go viral’, which I believe is because they want to feel popular. I want them to get value out of a video too, but what really gets results is the video grabbing the attention of one viewer who is a major decision maker, and then the film we made gives a return many times over.
Don’t get too wrapped up in the size of connections and reactions you have to online communications. It’s quality that gets results usually, not quantity.
My five suggestions are:
- Make a hit list of people you want to develop better relationships with – maybe five on each social media platform, and focus on them.
- Mute (on Twitter) or unfollow (on Facebook and LinkedIn) those connections that just post too much irrelevant content. They won’t know you can’t see them but it avoids you disconnecting and drawing more attention.
- Identify inactive accounts you are connected to or those that don’t follow you back, and clean up your feed – for Twitter, Manageflitter is good for this and free.
- Think about your messages you want to say, maybe focus on three to five key points you want to get across.
- Finally, limit how much time you spend using social media, and pay close attention to what actually works, or doesn’t.
Jonathan is the founder and camera operator / video director of BellyflopTV.
