Do millionaires make good Facebook friends? It depends--social media isn't the same for everybody!

A commercial Facebook page is all some think you need.

I've lost track of the all the times someone at the conference table proposes that what's called for is a greater presence in social media.  You know, If only we had a Facebook page! Or, I think our organization ought to have a twitter feed!  Well, it certainly is possible that this or that marketing problem could be solved by more tweets or Facebooking, but I'm going to just bet it's not as likely as some people think.  Two interesting stories came to my attention recently--both dramatize the reality that social media is to be respected not adored.  

Do millionaires make good Facebook friends?

The headline claims that the wealthy use social media more than everybody else!  But the story is a little more complicated than that:  Last week a study reported that millionaires [people with over $5M of personal wealth] have a Facebook presence at a rate that is substantially higher than the average person, 70% compared to about 60% in the broader population.  However, don't get carried away too soon in thinking that they use it the same--they don't.  Apparently, 38% of most people use Facebook daily, but what about millionaires?  It isn't even half of that--only 17% report using Facebook daily.  

[The study by SEI Wealth Network didn't report on this, but I'm just going to take a wild guess and predict that multimillionaires don't play Farmville--but I could be wrong!]

Maybe social media doesn't work the same for all businesses.

In a Wall Street Journal article by Sarah Needleman, "For 'B-to-B' companies, finding facebook 'friends' can be a struggle," the limits of Facebook for some firms are highlighted. Apparently in a survey of 230 B2B companies, 24% are using Facebook, Twitter, etc. for marketing--and 36% plan to do so in the up-coming year--but many find that it doesn't work very well for them.  But who's surprised?  Let's face it, it is more difficult to have interest, appeal, to "get friends" on Facebook for B2B companies--it's just hard to get worked-up for something that has so little emotional appeal in the first place.  Does this come as a shock to you? It doesn't to me.  

What's next? 

Along the winding road of marketing history there's become what is now a lengthy list of "new" media that have come along and promised to be "the answer," the breakthrough to all the manifest communication challenges:  first there was simply human speech, but then there was printing and signage, then telephone, then radio, then television, then the fax machine [yes I remember when some thought that this was a promising "advertising" medium], then the internet.  If you think about, each of these once was touted as the living end--just like social media is today--but ended up not being exactly that.   

Which raises the question:  I wonder what will follow social media on the list of end-all devices for businesses and people to communicate by?  

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