Social media isn’t what it used to be — there is a lot more content but the interaction is missing. As more and more companies are creating social media accounts and encouraging people to interact with them through these channels, it becomes increasingly more important to follow social media best practices to avoid unintentionally pushing away those who wish to interact with you. After all, it’s only a matter of clicks before your customer becomes interested in a competitor’s offerings on Facebook, Twitter, or other Web 2.0 channels.

Having had the opportunity to work with a local news station and construct a viable social media strategy for them, I have become very familiar with one of the more important concepts for proper social media usage: the signal-to-noise ratio. This ratio is a measure used in science and engineering to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by noise. But for social media purposes, the signal-to-noise ratio is a measure to quantify how much interesting, interaction-worthy content has been crowded out by excessive links, product pitches, and re-tweets that companies will oftentimes use to create the appearance of an “active social media presence.”

In optimizing your signal-to-noise ratio, your goal is to either increase your signal (aka – engaging content) and/or reduce your noise as much as possible. To do this properly, it is important to first go back to the basics of social media.

When distilled down to its simplest form, social media is about interacting with other people. Marketing strategy, customer relationship management, and other opportunities found within social media cannot flourish without this important bedrock of interaction with your customers and/or fan base. Businesses and thought leaders that do nothing but re-tweet other people’s content and advertise their sites/products are nothing more than information aggregators. Acting as an aggregator is not always a bad thing, but just realize that aggregation is not interaction, but rather pushing links and advertisements onto someone’s Twitter feed. Reducing the amount of advertising and re-tweets that aren’t directly relevant to your followers will reduce the noise. This is a step in the right direction.

However, working with a news station was an interesting challenge because people EXPECT news stations to act as news aggregators on social media. Therefore, all of the engaging content that could result in an interaction between the news staff and viewers, such as a “question of the day”, was drowned out by the constant tweeting of news articles throughout the day. People were accidentally skipping over the engaging content as they were skimming through the daily news on their feed.

In this type of situation, a good rule of thumb is: when you cannot remove the noise, separate it as much as possible. If people expect news aggregation or any sort of aggregation from your business, designate the company Twitter account as the dedicated news feed (example: Acme Co). People who are interested in this aggregation will now have an account to follow specifically for this purpose. Next, you need to make sure that customers are as comfortable as possible reaching out to your business. For customers on social media who are looking to discuss ideas, share comments, and express opinions, key employees within the company should create their own Twitter accounts (example: AcmeCo Jonathan). Dell, for instance, has more than 20 official Twitter accounts, each managed by an individual, not a faceless business unit. It is in such “individual” accounts where the interaction between followers and customers can take place, distinctly separate from the aggregation. Small amounts of re-tweeting can occur between the company Twitter account and the employee accounts if employees feel that a certain piece of aggregated content would be valuable for their followers. By allowing Twitter users to choose what they want showing up on their news feed, the result will be significantly less noise.

Now that the noise level has been reduced, it’s time to boost the signal. Boosting the signal is basically increasing the relevance and prevalence of your content. To increase relevance, it is necessary to experiment with different ideas to see what your followers respond most to. Sometimes a simple: “I’d love to hear your comments about X product or Y service” can be enough to get your followers interacting. Perhaps hypothetical questions about a future product or service may pique the attention of your followers. Personal news, especially good news, works too. Experimentation and taking note of response levels is very important. However, prevalence must be taken into account as well. If you’re posting extremely relevant content at 3 am, it’s very likely that your followers won’t see the content because it’s so far down on their feed by the time they check Twitter the following afternoon. Experimenting with posting at different times throughout the day is a good practice. It is also acceptable to re-post certain Tweets a few times throughout the day to target people who check Twitter at different points in the day. By playing around with relevance and prevalence, you will begin to increase the signal in your signal-to-noise ratio.

These strategies aren’t difficult to implement. It just requires that someone care about the interaction that occurs on social media. Rather than seeing it as another marketing platform that can achieve a certain ROI, social media should be viewed as a valuable opportunity to directly connect and engage with your potential and current customers. When viewed in this light, it can be noted that there are a lot of similarities between a face-to-face interaction and social media interaction. When talking to someone in person or over the phone, it is usually wise to avoid babbling on and on about topics that person probably doesn’t care about (reduce your noise). Instead, identify what this person is interested in and leverage that as much as possible (increase your signal). And if someone ever reached out to you by walking over to you and extending their hand, choosing to ignore them would be considered incredibly rude. So why do so many companies feel that this is appropriate conduct on social media? It’s as if quantity is mistaken as more important than the quality of your social media presence. By keeping the fundamentals of social media in mind at all times, you be in the right place to develop a powerful social media presence that consumers will appreciate, recognize, and want to be a part of.

Have you had a notable experience with a business through social media lately? If so, share your experience in the comments below.