The other day I attended a talk where the presenter claimed that all of us needed to be on social media and all of us has had to have a certain number of people following us to be relevant. With Facebook it was 1000 fans, LinkedIn 250 connections, Twitter 500 people, etc. To be honest my Facebook page only 280 fans at the time of this writing. I exceed the minimum numbers on the other accounts, but numbers doesn’t matter that much to me. What matters is that I have relationships with people that have chosen to follow me.

The relationships you have are what define your business. I have over a thousand on Linkedin in my connections. I don’t know even half of them and of the people I know, most of them are casual acquaintances. Some of them turn into business connections, based in part on getting to know me via my social media interactions. But the people I connect with choose to move that connection beyond social media. Likewise the majority of people on my Facebook page are mostly passive observers. A few of them comment regularly and it is with those people that I have the greatest breadth of relationships.

Social media is sometimes treated as a posting platform, where you belt your message out to everyone and hope someone will respond. I prefer to instead engage people and develop relationships. If they really want my business, they’ll get involved and we’ll start getting to know each other. All numbers really does is expand my exposure, but nothing is guaranteed until people start to interact with me.

My advice? Let your numbers grow organically, treat your followers with respect, and build relationships. You will get business if you approach it from this angle. Most importantly you’ll develop true social influence and be able to help people who need what you have to offer.

Let me use a personal example. Up until recently I’ve resisted the idea of getting a smart phone. I know a lot of people have them, but I didn’t feel it was worth the hassle of learning how to use one when all I really want it for is to make calls and send occasional texts. Recently, however my feelings about this technology have changed and I’m recognizing how I can actually use it to enhance and simplify the running of my business. Until I could understand how it could benefit my business, I didn’t see a point in getting the technology, and in fact there wasn’t a point. what I had already worked well enough for me. But once I understood how a smart phone could improve my business, then it made sense to upgrade to one.

And how does getting a smart phone improve my business? Square up offers a way for me to take credit card cheaply and efficiently using my smart phone. That tool will allow me to save money each month I don’t use my credit card service (I currently get charged a base fee even if I don’t use the credit card service, while square up is pay as you go). I also recently realized that I could set up appointments via my phone, getting rid of the need for a physical calendar, and I’m even going to use my smart phone for more of my social media activities. All of these actions tell me that I can implement this technology and it will benefit my business.

What about you? Do you know why you are using technology for your business and how implementing it is actually benefiting your business? Are you using your tech to help you save time and streamline your activities? These are good questions to ask that can help you determine if you are using the right technology for your business. Unless you know why you are using the technology and how it will benefit your business, there’s no point in using it.

Companies make the same mistake, where they make what is ultimately an inappropriate response to what someone posted in order to contain a situation. The result is that they end up making more of an issue out of it, usually to their own detriment. While it’s important to respond to commentary people make, its equally as important to make wise choices in how you respond. For example, in Governor Brownback’s case, he could have simply ignored the tweet or made an appropriate response. Instead what he’s done is call into question censorship issues, and has even had people call him out on using social media management services. Not exactly an effective response.

Sometimes a company needs to let its advocates respond. For example if someone bad mouths a business on its fan page, there is a good chance the fans will leap to the business’s defense. That doesn’t mean you should leave the negative comment there, but if someone does address it, thank them for speaking up. Show them appreciation for recognizing the value of your business and supporting you.

At other times a company needs to respond, but any response should be courteous and to the point, without making a big deal of what the person has said. A measured response can be effective because it shows you aren’t panicked, and that you want to take the time to address the matter in a way that solves the issue.

Social media only backfires when people make a big deal out of what’s being said on it. If you don’t panic, and you actually develop a thoughtful response and follow through on what you’ve said, most people will be happy. Oddly enough they just want someone to care.

I’ve always found Klout to be narcissistic, something I wrote about several years ago, when I first encountered it. Klout would prompt people to post their klout score to their network, to show how “influential” they are. This struck me then as creating an inflated sense of self-worth, while trying to get more influence, and also promoting Klout as a service in the process.

If you really want to measure your social influence, look at your online social behavior. Are you engaging people? Are you listening? Are you being helpful? If you are doing all of these activities, and also being yourself in the process than you will attract people to you that find value in what you do. It’s really as simple as that. Klout can provide measurements of how you can improve and award you points for taking those actions, but what it can’t do is determine if those actions really produce social influence. Only the people you interact with can determine that: By responding to you. So here’s a question: Are you producing content that makes people want to respond? If not, then clearly, no matter how Klout rates you, you don’t have as much social influence as you think you have. Learn the proper social media behaviors and you will have that influence. Just make sure you use it wisely.

Successful social media is targeted toward helping you connect with your ideal audience of consumers. It’s also targeted toward giving those consumers a voice and interaction in regards to what they like and want to know more about. Social media is about offering information, but not just any information. People care less about the products or services you offer and more about the accomplishments and benefits that will be obtained. They want to know how it will make their lives easier, better, more pleasurable etc.

We get caught up sometimes, with social media, in talking about our businesses, that we forget its not about us…it’s about them. Successful social media considers what it is the consumer wants, what it is they need and then it provides what it can to help the consumer realize that want or need.

Consumers investigate what they are interested in. They will use google, wikipedia, as well as social media outlets to discover every thing they can on a given subject of interest…but its important to note that they trust their network more than they trust the business. The business has a vested interest in selling the service or product, whereas the consumer’s network probably doesn’t.

Successful social media campaigns are more focused on social interaction and conversation, in order to inform consumers and help them make decisions without going in for a hard sell. Businesses that use social media well keep this in mind in their interactions. They know that its more important to generate conversation and social connections, because all of that leads to more exposure and helps people learn about the brand and whether or not they want anything to do with it.

Always keep in mind that your audience is what dictates your marketing. I often see companies get caught up in their own image, losing in the process an awareness about their audience and what they really want, or worse assuming that they know what their audience wants and then ignoring their audience when they tell them otherwise. It’s better to listen carefully and respond with a focus toward genuinely helping your audience. You’ll also help your business and you’ll show your audience that you are oriented toward their needs.

My own response is that a person should just send a direct message. It’s a private response to the person, so it doesn’t show up on everyone’s twitter feed. Other people argued that you should thank the people publicly, because it shows that you’re engaged. I don’t think thanking people publicly really engages them beyond the thanks. There’s no prompt to have a conversation or say anything. I’d rather write a response to one of their posts, to stimulate conversation. Conversation shows more engagement than thanks…it shows genuine interest, as opposed to a thanks, which signals acknowledgment, but not an invitation to say anything.

The reality though is that many people don’t converse on Twitter. Twitter is a place to post information, and if people like it or find it interesting they’ll retweet it. Occasionally I’ll see conversation, but for the most part people are clamoring to be heard, to attract, to somehow get your eyes on what they have to offer.

I thank people who retweet me, and I recognize that they have made that choice to spread my message to their network, but I think the best compliment I can give them is to retweet some of their news and also comment on it. Commenting, even more than retweeting, signifies that there’s something significant about the message, and even generates conversation, which gives the message more life than just a retweet will.

Something which is sometimes overlooked in social media is that social media isn’t just a technology interface. The peril of treating social media as a technology interface is that people don’t recognize they are dealing with people on the other end of the interface. Because social media is mostly a textual medium, this becomes a problem, because you are only communicating with 7% of the total human language. Social etiquette is especially important in order to meaningfully connect with people.

The other problem is that even if you are connected to 7000 people, your ability to relate to those people is truncated by the volume of people and your ability to be able to know those people. Being connected to 7000 people doesn’t mean much if they are just numbers, and if you can’t provide a way to interact with the people. Being able to keep up with all those people is hard and even if you’re just using using the account to update people, at a certain point people want personal interaction with you.

7000 people seems impressive. But what makes that impressive is not the number of people, but the quality of relationship you have with those people. The reason celebrities are sometimes so well-regarded is because they know how to create an intimate illusion of connection with people. They’ve had to learn how to do this and now social media requires that same ability. Can you provide a way for people to feel connected to you so that they are motivated to action? That question is key to really determining if social media can enable meaningful social connections that provide people the motivation to not jut stay online, but go to a store, event, or party as a result of finding out about it through social media.