I’m More Popular than You!

Imagine you’re at a dinner party with a group of people, and someone elbows into the conversation to let you know they are more popular than you. What would your reaction be? How would you feel?

Recently, I’ve watched ‘social score’ services like the very popular Klout crop up, which are great tools for measuring corporate social media effectiveness, but when you post them on your social media accounts, what does that say about you and your followers?

It seems that Twitter, Facebook and other services may be great for networking and sharing information, but many people stumble into them without considering how their interactions might be perceived.

Posting your Klout score, tweeting to say you’ve reached 1,000 followers and other such ‘bragging’ behaviors seem to be becoming more commonplace, and the posters obviously aren’t realizing the subconscious messages they are sending.

The problem with social media is the lack of thinking time before posting. With traditional marketing, a message is crafted, re-written, discussed and then approved for distribution. Sending a tweet or posting on the corporate Facebook account takes no more than a few keystrokes.

I’ve previously shared some of the disasters I’ve seen on social media, however these are smaller in impact individually, however what does it say about a brand if they become commonplace?

Let me know what social media mistakes you’ve seen from businesses – send me an email to tribune@sitepoint.com – I’ll create a list of what annoys us all, and publish it in a future edition of the Tribune for us all to learn from.