What makes a good social post, I ask? Lots of engagement and response, you say. Wrong, I say. Because a few good engagements are worth a thousand irrelevant ones. It all comes back to why you are doing social posting in the first place. Is it because you want to interact with lots of people in your commercial circuit? Perhaps. Is it likely that lots will respond to any one post? Probably not. I would suggest that if a post, or a series of posts, catches the eye of someone you would like to be engaged with, then that is incredibly valuable. It’s not really about volume for most businesspeople.

Take the example of a post I saw recently from the CFO of one of our client companies. It had over 250 likes and 50 comments. Not bad, eh? Then I looked at who the engagement was from. Over 70% were people in her own group company. So, basically, sycophants. The remaining 30% were a rag-bag of students, suppliers and friends. The comments were all formulaic – presumably auto-generated. Conclusion – not a very helpful or valuable set of responses and engagements.

In contrast, I looked at another client’s post – done around the same time. This client is in charge of her company’s relationships with key distributors, integrators and resellers. Worldwide, this probably amounts to a total audience of no more than 70-80 companies. Her post had fifteen likes and five comments. All the likes were from her key reseller organisations. The five who made comments wrote responses that were thoughtful, real, specific and engaging in true observation/conversation.

In short, they had all the hallmarks of good relationship development.

So which do you think is the most valuable and effective social posting? Which is most likely to add to the sum of commercial relationships? And which is simply vanity & ego-massage?

Business organisations need to stop crowing about response and engagement volumes. They’re great when they are genuine… but mostly they aren’t. Get under the skin of the response and find out who’s actually doing it!