When it comes to social media, it’s not the numbers that count. You can have a Facebook page with tens of thousands of fans and a Twitter timeline with millions of followers, but if those people aren’t interacting with you, you’re not doing a thing.

Social media isn’t about numbers. It’s about engagement. It’s about building a community around your brand and deepening your relationship with members of that community.

You see hundreds of brands every day. But the ones you buy are the products that you feel are a part of your life. They’re brands you’re familiar with, like, and trust.

That’s the relationship that social media can bring to a business. It takes time to build, but once you have it, and as long as you maintain it, it can be very powerful.

The depth of that relationship is measured by engagement. The more your followers engage with you, answering your questions, commenting on your posts, and asking you for advice, the deeper the engagement and the more valuable the relationship.

That’s something that Google’s Buzz appears to be bringing to users.

I’ve been playing around a bit with Buzz and I’ve started to notice something. Other people have started to notice it, too.

The level of engagement on Buzz can be much deeper than on other social media sites. People are willing to hang around, talk in depth about a topic, and contribute to discussions with genuinely useful content.

That’s different than on Twitter, where discussions tend to involve more people but be shallower and shorter. Because Twitter only allows posts of up to 140 characters, it’s a great place to meet new people and stay for a quick chat.

Buzz looks like the place to go for a long chat.

That makes it more demanding than Twitter too. You have to choose your discussion points carefully and you might want to follow fewer people so that you’re not overwhelmed by the number and length of the threads. And you can target posts to different groups of people as well, sending content only to the people who want it most.

It’s still the early days for Buzz, but now that Google has sorted out the privacy issues, it looks like it might well have good days ahead.

Get your free PDF on how best to capitalize on Google Buzz by clicking on the download button below.

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