How to deal with following on social media?

[Tron]

It's awesome that you guys are looking at social media, it's a great way to built relationships.

Here's the thing, you CAN go ahead and follow 100 people and the general rule is 10-15% will follow back. This is good for getting started and making yourself look official (followers are exponential, the more you have, the faster you'll get more because it makes you look more popular). I used to do this all the time, follow people and then delete them and keep following more people until that 10% that followed me back ended up being 500 followers. Again this can work but it works better when you actually follow relevant people, potential customers.

I can say, from a business point of view this is extremely timely to do. In my social media, I believe your customers follow you for 2 reasons. For info or for incentives. Only those 2 reasons.

By info I mean for example, I worked for a huge event that was big in my city. People would follow us just for information on our shows, food menus, etc. it was a huge event and people WANTED that info for when they came. I worked for an auto repair company and tried doing the same thing, we did a campaign where we posted important auto maintenance tips and told people about it in store- NOONE cared about the info/content so it didn't work. Info is similar to why people follow celebrities, they aren't gaining anything just info. If you think people care enough about your product and want info they might follow your brand.

Incentives is the big one and always seems to work for me. By this I mean, you give them something for following you. For example, I worked at clothing company and we did a "Facebook fan day" where all our Facebook fans got 15% off and we promoted it in-store right at the till ( while people were paying). We even allowed people to like us in-store and show the cashier . It worked INCREDIBLE. Not only does it bring customers in your store to your social media, but it brings people on social media in your store for whatever deal you're running.

You can run incentives as exclusive FB deals, contests (where people like you on fb to enter), giveaways, draws, etc. incentives scare some companies because it seems like a cost but really it's just discounts and you CANNOT beat the relationships that happen when you can incentivize people to join you on social media.

Just remember the rules, some people may follow you for no reason but its largely for information and incentives.