Let’s get meta for a minute.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what in social media could qualify as an asset to a business. While the answer to that question varies greatly by company and industry, the crux of it is this: If it hurts your business to lose it, it’s an asset.

In other words, if one day I decided to ditch my blog, my business would suffer. My clients generally find me through my blog, and cutting off that business appendage would sever a great source of leads. A bad thing.

If, on the other hand, I were to delete my Twitter account, I probably wouldn’t suffer too much as a result. True, I have gotten leads from Twitter, but the fact is that I could have just as easily gotten those leads from somewhere else — Facebook, for example.

It’s relatively easy to go through all of your social media apparatuses and figure out which ones represent assets and which do not. And I highly recommend that you do, if for no other reason than to prioritize where you invest your time.

But apart from apparatuses, what else in social media is an asset? Content, for one, is certainly an asset. So are important relationships with key influencers.

But what about followers?

Well… I just don’t know. So I asked some friends. Here’s what they had to say:

I think the shorthand phrase of “own” your audience falsely gives the sense of possesiveness you mention. In fact, it’s not about “owning” your audience, but earning their trust. That you must EARN the trust from your audience/customers has always been true and hasn’t changed. To some extent, they “own” you (if you’re lucky) more than you own them….So Facebook fans, twitter followers, blog readers, etc are “assets” for sure. But like any asset, you must first earn it, then keep it, then use it.“

So followers certainly are assets, if they trust us to provide them good content. On the other hand…

…some people “friend” or “like” a given Facebook entity simply to add to their own friends list (I remember a young teen contending that he was popular because he had over 30 Facebook friends, a specious argument if ever there was one.)

Others “like” a given company to receive a special promotion (a Detroit-area window company was giving out pizza coupons to people who friended it.)

I think there is a serious danger of deluding oneself into thinking that one has a greater advantage than one does by thinking of Facebook friends as assets because they may or may not be.

Of course, it could be presumptuous to assume that one brand could ever garner enough of one person’s attention to claim ownership:

The possessive attitude towards an audience is also based on myth…. Your audience is not following only you and their attention will shift like the winds.

If Mr. Saunders is right, then we can think of followers as assets only as long as we understand that they are busy being assets for other brands, too. And even then, Mr. LaDuke will tell us that these followers have to be following us for the right reasons in order to be considered assets at all. Those “right reasons” are mainly trust-centric, according to Mr. Chronister — in other words, we must earn the right to think of followers as business assets.

I think this makes a lot of good sense. What other insights would you give to round out this topic?

Photo Credit: Anirudh Koul