Im talking about reach and impact. Most of us are creating social strategy for brands and trying to increase the impact those brands have on their customers. AKA the impact that brand has on influencing their fans to become customers and then on those customers to become return customers.

But we must take a step back. Can social media regularly achieve this impact? Can we keep on selling, selling, selling on social channels that are inherently designed to facilitate social relationships rather than business to consumer relationships, and still come off as relevant and indispensable to our fans’ daily consumption of media?

I say no.

I say as brand managers, as those few who spend their time trying create a personality for companies that is engaging to people all day, every day, we have to give up our urge to sell, to impact, so that we may actually sell and impact.

I’m saying that we can’t increase awareness and build virtual relationships with people online at the same time that we are saying, “Hey, come buy this,” “Come look at this.”

We have to choose one or the other. Either reach people or impact people not reach and impact people.

And we have to choose reach. Reach comes first. You can’t impact someone if you first do not have a relationship with them. A relationship that is more than a like. One that is built on some semblance of trust and mutual interest. And the mutual interest or at least visage of it, is what creates the trust.

So in creating our social strategies, we must first understand how we reach our audience, how we talk with them in a way that creates a dialogue not a monologue. How we solicit a response of engagement in the moment with no agenda of a response in the moment after (that is how is must seem).

Impact is our ultimate goal, but we must play by the rules. We will achieve this impact only after we harness the power of our reach. But we must first be successful with our reach and to do that we must release, for a bit, our obsession with impact.

Really, I shouldn’t say the new algorithm is good for business, but rather, the new algorithm is good for good business.

Good business on social media, is a brand that uses the tool as it is meant to be used – to create and strengthen relationships not customership. Our customers are people and we have to treat them as such. People are not always in the mindset to buy, but they are always in the mindset to be engaged and reengaged.

You must know your fans’ flavor of engagement.

The moment you start using the medium as a place to sell (as we all have), you break the understood rules of Facebook. And not the rules of corporate FB but the rules of the now one billion people using it. 

Facebook is a place for shared acknowledgement. We all share things on social media to have others acknowledge it and in turn we acknowledge what others are doing. The key here is the shared part. When us brands came into the mix, we wanted the acknowledgement but without the acknowledging. We wanted to win, but we didn’t want to play the game or at least not by the rules.

And now Facebook is saying no more. Yes, this “no more” is being enforced by the new Edgerank, but it has always been enforced to a certain extent by users. We never wanted our news feeds congested with a slew of “check out our new this” or “read my latest this” type posts. 

Chances are if what you have to say is bigger than the space you have to say it on Facebook, it’s not right for Facebook. It’s spammy. You’re selling something. You’re not playing by the rules. You want acknowledgement. You need it, and it shows.

So that is why I think the new algorithm is good for good business. Because good business on Facebook has always been about acknowledging the fans, seeing what they like and doing more of it. If that is the case, then what you’re doing is going to keep engaging your fans and going to make the little fingers of Facebook give you the thumbs up and appear on more news feeds. 

And, good businesses, as you keep engaging your fans and keep getting your posts the weight on Edgerank they need to be pushed in front of a larger and larger portion of your audience, your competition for attention (at least in relationship to other brands) is going to be slim. Those brands not playing by the rules of engagement are not going to be seen on the same feeds as yours. 

So play by the rules or break out the pocketbook and buy your views because soon the only brands that will get eyes are the ones with money and the ones who actually say something their fans want to hear.

And if it’s not, it’s worthless.

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.