I see signs like this all the time in the windows of businesses, and I have to say, I'm really conflicted here. On the one hand, good for them for being proactive. I'm always lecturing people about how they should have more of presence on social media, why is their website in Flash, blah blah blah, and obviously this business is making an effort.
I wonder, though– when people hang a sign like this in their windows, do they REALLY understand just how many mental steps it's going to take to get from that little Facebook "F" to someone actually subscribing to your Facebook Fan Page to get your awesome content.
That would go a little something….like this.
Interested person goes into your restaurant. They like it. They have dinner, maybe. They see your social media sign on the way out, and since it doesn't have a clearly-stated url, you are now asking them to go to Facebook (either on their phone or when they get home), ignore the 40 bazillion updates from their friends and family, remember the name of your restaurent (assuming that you have your Facebook Fan Page set up correctly and are not a "business acting as a profile," because if you are doing that, Facebook is about to come shut you down, so all those people you think are your "friends" are going away anyway), locate your restaurant's Facebook Fan Page, "Like" it, and even then, your content has to be so fantastically relevant, it makes it through Facebook's algorithm and floats up into their news feed. Same with Twitter, same with YouTube.
I'm just saying, if you're some kind of social business and you have your stuff together, I would recommend that you make individual, take-home cards to "Find Us On Social Media," and that those cards should contain individuated urls for each social media property where you put content.
The bottom line: you are assuming that your customers are MUCH smarter and better with the follow-through than they actually are. If I had to "guesstimate," I would guess that maybe 1% of your customer base actually makes it all the way to your social media properties with that signage. In case you're curious, if I had a website-type property that was converting at 1%, I would PULL THE PLUG, or at least do some trial and error work until I figured out what the hell was wrong there.
In case you're curious, I still have not found a solution to this "Posterous is gone" problem, and those missing posts are making me really cranky.
