If you frequent the “twittersphere” or Facebook you’ll often come across businesses and their staff trying to market their products and services to you.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, how they actually do it is another matter entirely …

But how successful are most of their attempts to “tap in” to “social media” and “maximise” their “potential”?

You’d have to wonder at times, especially when you look at how few “fans” or “followers” some of them actually have.

Fantasy animals, however, manage to get a reasonably respectable following..

Common Unicorn, for example, has over 1400 followers on Twitter and is listed 50 times:

Twitter Unicorn

The unicorn is eclipsed by a Squirrel, however, who has managed to attract over 13.5k followers – being listed 660 times!

Twitter Squirrel

What about Facebook?

Facebook seems to be a great place to find oddly named “groups” for just about every possible “idea” under the sun, but a Danish pineapple has managed to get over 167k fans! Not to be outdone, Germany has a pretzel with over 379k !

And we shouldn’t forget that even cats, dogs and other pets are also finding a following on Facebook…

Why do I bring this up?

Well to start with it amused me, but also it puts things into perspective. A lot of people seem to be making a lot of money from businesses that want to “tap into” social media as part of their marketing. While there is nothing exactly “wrong” with that you’d have to wonder what kind of metrics they are using to sell their services to their clientele.

If a fruit or a pretzel can get  huge following on Facebook without it actually selling anything to anyone, how well can a “normal” business expect to do?

What is a measurement of their “success”?

The reality is that there probably isn’t a simple way to “measure” success. There are a lot of different factors that come into play.

But I digress..

Maybe the real “takeaway” from these rather silly examples is that they all share one thing in common – fun. They’re all frivolous fun. People use and interact with social media sites in their spare time, as well as during office hours. If you look at the kind of links people share, the pictures they post etc., you quickly realise that they don’t go to “social media” to buy or to be “sold to” or “marketed to”.

If you can instill some level of “fun” into your “presence” maybe you’ll find that you are actually more successful, though getting the balance right might not be that as easy for a business as it is for a fantasy animal.

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