With the rise of Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and so many more, it has literally become a contest to see who can get the most friends or followers.  But is that really the goal you should be striving for?

Social Media is different from mass media like television and radio, and should be treated as such.

Using Social Media The Right Way

Social media is for building relationships.  Meaningful, deeper relationships with a small group of people at a time.  If you try to target more than a handful of people at once, you will spread yourself too thin and the relationship will not be as strong.

If you’ve ever been to a physical networking conference like BlogHer, Affiliate Summit, or IzeaFest, you probably noticed that while you talked to literally hundreds of people, there were only those 4-5 that you really connected with.

Social media acts in the same way.  You can only successfully make great connections with 4-5 people at a time.

Focus on building deeper more meaningful relationships rather than building huge followers that end up being shallow.

The deeper relationships you build will result in readers that love everything you write just because you wrote it.  Those readers will then talk about you to the friends that trust them and recommend your blog all the time.

This is a real word of mouth marketing technique that results in a larger, more dedicated following and a more trustworthy community.

Mass Twitter Follower Tools Are The Wrong Approach

Instead of signing up for the mass twitter following tools like TwitterFollower that increase your followers by hundreds and sometimes thousands, try steering clear.

They are great if all you want to do is build a marketing list of people, but you shouldn’t be using Twitter or other social media sites to simply promote your stuff.  If you do, people will stop following you, most likely block you, and sometimes report you as spam.

A Social Media Challenge

I challenge you to pick 5 people on the social media sites you use and really connect with them.  Start a conversation and continue that conversation for weeks, month, and years.

Build those relationships and after a couple of weeks of building the relationship, pick 5 more people and do the same thing.

You’ll be surprised at the results.

What are your thoughts on building deeper more meaningful relationships?  Do you focus on it, or do you tend to promote yourself to thousands of shallower relationships?