I work in social media. I use it in my daily life. Maybe too much? Who’s to say? But it looks like it is going to stay around, and I hope so because as for right now it’s keeping the lights on.

It’s not the tools that I’m interested in. It’s not a Facebook page or a Pinterest board that intrigues me. It’s the reason why I am intrigued by these things that intrigues me (there is sense in that sentence somewhere).

If you are reading this, you probably manage a page or two and are reading up because that’s what you do in between posting and developing strategy for the next week, month, year. And besides the words, images, and videos you repurpose for various channels, the most reoccurring theme in your job is numbers. The number of followers you have, the number of people talking about you. How many people retweet or repin you. And these numbers are important. Metrics are indispensable. They tell us what is working and what is not.

But numbers don’t tell you why something is working. They don’t give a picture of who your follower is, what she was doing when she decided to like you, share you, comment to you.

So that is what intrigues me. Who are all these people? including each one of us. How do we stop seeing our followers, our likes, less like numbers and more like the individual people they are.

Every campaign I’ve ever ran with individuals who make up my audience in mind rather than a “target” audience have been the most successful.