How many times have to heard the line ‘Quality Over Quantity’?  That quote is probably most used by poor sports teams who can’t seem to win a game(thank you New York Knicks, and Rangers), or used in reference to how many friends a person has.  Everyone knows you always pick quality over quantity, it just doesnt make sense not to.  Why have 50 friends surrounding you with only 1 who actually cares, when you can have 5 best friends who will always tell it to you like it is?

The same logic goes for social networking as well. Currently, more than 700,00 businesses have active pages on Facebook, gathering some 5.3 billion fans and counting.  Small local businesses gather a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand fans, while some major corporations boast fan counts well over 1 million.  The questions I am going to raise at this point is this: At what point does the quantity of your fan base effect the quality of the ultimate goal of fan interaction and increased brand awareness?  Is it better to have 50,000 fans who are devoted to your brand, and bring quality interactions to your Facebook page, or to have 2 million fans who just don’t care? Would a company substitute bragging rights of millions of fans, over qaulity fan interaction leading to greater objectives of the business as a whole?  We sure hope not.

Here are a two examples:

Target (and we mean ZERO disrespect to them, just an example!) at last glance has close to 700,000 fans on their Facebook pages, but upon closer inspection to the actual quality of the fan interaction and user experience is relatively low compared to the number of “fans” of their page.

Almost 700,000 fans and they get a whopping 118 Likes and 51 comments.  This is just one example,there are many.  An example of quality fan interaction with a group not nearly as large came right to mind when I found The Childrens Place Facebook Page, a brand of children’s clothing boasting a little over 100,000 fans.   Being a child of the 90s i grew up in these clothes and had to become a fan. Upon closer inspection of their site,what do I see but quality interaction. Take a look:

Almost 900 comments from a pool of a little over 100,000 fans. Not too shabby.  Yes, Target is a bigger company and by that fact will have more fans, but this shows that fans of certain brands to click to become a fan and never visit the site again.  It also shows that brand loyalty can still translate positively even in this new medium for reaching consumers of your brand.

In summary, QUALITY OVER QUANTITY!!!