One of the perils of having a lot of PR student connections in my own network, especially lately, is being bombarded with Facebook fan page suggestions for a lot of junk I’m not really interested in. I don’t mean to sound rude, but I think this is one of the negative aspects of having an intern do your social media. I just defriended a connection who invited me to the same lame Facebook page for the fourth time, so that’s what sparked this post.

I know there are two sides to the topic of interns running social media, but when it comes to gathering Twitter followers and Facebook fans, you need to be strategic about your approach. About a month ago, Gini Dietrich posted about the issue of social media interns, and it’s a good read if you didn’t know interns are running a lot of social media programs. If you do have an intern running your social media, here are some tips from me as a human being and a PR student:

• Don’t assume your connections are going to be interested in a local restaurant 2,000 miles away or an organization that means nothing to them. When you are inviting friends, make sure you know something about that person that would lead them to be interested in your cause or company. Even better is to make your organization relevant to other people.
• If someone isn’t interested in that cause of company once, they will not be interested in it a second time. Nor the third, fourth, fifth… etc. When you request something from a connection more than once, you become a spammer. A lot of people don’t like spammers, so don’t be one.
• What’s in it for your followers? Anything? Then no thanks. I rarely follow companies on Twitter; when I do, it’s because they occasionally offer something free or provide me (and the rest of their followers) with exclusive information or content. Social media shouldn’t be another channel for the same message. Pay attention to your audience and know what they are looking for.
• Social media isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality. Just because you conned 1,000 of your Facebook friends to become a fan of your company’s page does not mean it’s going to benefit your company. I would take 50 quality connections who are genuine fans over 1,000 randoms any day.
• Make sure you spend time with your community. In general, you should be simply interacting about two-thirds of the time and promoting your organization the other third.

What do you think? Do you see this problem a lot? How do you respond? Any best practices you can share?

Photo by Mulad on Flickr.