Qualifying and Quantifying Your Social Media Strategy

Corvida has an awesome post on Chris Brogan’s blog called Decreasing Our Connections While Increasing Our Networks. The basic rundown of the post (which you should go read) is her exasperation over the amount of “friends” she has over various networks and the lack of a deeper and real connection between the two.

From the post:

Maybe growth on some of these networks isn’t the best thing in the world. Should there be self-imposed limits on how many people you befriend? No because in the end, while your network growth may increase, your connection with your network still increases. However, the rate at which the connection can increase actually decreases. Did that make sense? Unless your friends are constantly questioning you or keeping tabs on you, it’s going to take a lot longer to make deeper connections the more your network grows.

We have been talking a lot about creating deeper relationships through social media. When you are adding hundreds of people on networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other networks it is hard to make the same connection as before! Iwrote recently about turning friends, followers, and subscribers into a deeper connection. After all the purpose of sharing in a community driven environment should be relationship building whether for business or personal use.

The question has been presented: How do you take the massive amount of users on social networks and par them down to create meaningful relationships online? Quantify and Qualify.

Quantifying Your Social Media Experience

There are some networks where a huge following is necessary to gain the full experience of the site. FriendFeed is where I quantify my FriendFeeders for the ultimate experience. Quantifying in a social media world basically means I gain an increased quality of experience based on the quantity of the people I am following.

Qualifying Your Social Media Experience

I qualify my niche networks in social media. I have found that I have an increase in quality without necessary having a huge quantity of followers on my geographically direct communities. Smaller Indiana and LinkedIN have been my niche quality sites for my social media experience. Smaller Indiana is a geographically located social network for people in Indiana. And for LinkedIN? I only tend to add people I have met in an offline environment on LinkedIN. My niche networks tend to be the place where there is a direct form of quality conversations.

How do you manage your networks? Do you find you get more or less quality based on the quantity of your friends or subscribers?

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