Over the next 12 months I’ll be working at Advent as their intern during my placement year. I’m a marketing student at the University of the West of England, Bristol. This will be a weekly blog about my time at Advent. 

Some may perceive this way of communication as a game changer in the business world, while others believe it to be far from social, but I have a question to pose, is it quantity or quality that really dominates our goals over social media?

‘A thousand followers but only one retweet, what’s going on?!’- I came across this tweet earlier in the week from a follower and it got me thinking, we live in a world where quality is so prominent and important, so why when it comes to social media does quantity become a huge factor? Do we really feel the need for thousands of followers that may never actually delve into your blogs and tweets? It’s clicks over cliques.

I appreciate why quantity is important, but if it gets to a stage where you’re following the wrong people then your stories and tweets may be wasted.

As humans, we are addicted to interaction and that sense of ‘belonging’ and as a PR company, we are all about communication. There is a definite sense of community on Twitter within each industry and sector. We love engagements, retweets, ‘claim to fame’ followers, we all thrive off of it, but when does it become pointless?

The pen and paper became computers, which in turn became laptops, then onto the smartphone. In this day and age we have everything we could possible want to know at the click of a button, but many companies do not exploit this way of living, personally, I feel that social media NEEDS to be implemented into every business strategy to keep afloat in this day and age.

You need to think about the following:

WHO is your specific audience? There is a definite need to target tweets.

We NEED security that our tweets will spark engagement, engagement sparks followers, piece of cake really.

But…if we want to get really technical and delve into the secrets of being a social media guru, there are hundreds of other factors we could consider.

All companies need to take these factors on board- social media trends and platforms on which we communicate on will grow and expand to become things that we didn’t think were possible, the only way to stay afloat is to embrace it, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Olivia Wynne