Consumers Don’t Always Want to Be Your Friend

The Global Web Index from Lightspeed Research recently shared some information about how Americans view brands. The findings offer some insight that businesses may want to consider when plotting their strategies for social media, blogging, and general interactivity with customers online.

"Helping consumers keep up to date on topics that were important to them was also key, followed by being entertaining, becoming part of a daily routine, and informing consumers about the product and the company," says eMarketer, who provides some useful graphs based on the Global Web Index info.  "Consumers were relatively uninterested in brands that tried to act like their friends."

But social networking is about making friends isn’t it? Well, in some ways, but it doesn’t have to be. Remember, from the business perspective, social networks should only be considered as tools to use to help you meet specific goals. If you don’t want to get too friendly, you can still use Facebook and Twitter without doing so.

If your goal is to keep people informed, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are great for that. It is easy to post an update to either, and if they want those updates, they will get them. This may appear contradictory to advice about using social media to engage with customers and it being "all about the conversation."

The truth of the matter is that it can be about that too if you want it to be. Again, it depends on your goals. Facebook and Twitter don’t create your business strategy for you anymore than an email client does or a telephone. It’s how you use it that will determine the outcome.