With all the conversations going on in radio circles about the uses of social media, there’s a giant, Grand Canyon-sized difference being overlooked.  Let’s just use Facebook as the best example, simply because it’s the most-utilized social media platform.

As of this writing, there are about 225 million people in the United States using Facebook.

But there are over 323 million people in this country, and well over 90% of them listen to radio for a significant amount of time every single day.  So radio has somewhere between sixty-five to ninety million more people using it every single day than Facebook does.

I’ve talked a lot about how random postings on Facebook don’t make for compelling radio Content; quite the opposite, usually.  And this is why: because they’re used in totally different ways.

Facebook is where people go to kill time.

But radio is where people go for companionship.

A Facebook “conversation” can’t possibly compete on a regular basis with an air talent, right here, right now, in this moment, saying something relevant to me.  It can’t give me the weather (like the other day, when I heard a midday jock say “It just started raining a couple of minutes ago…”), it can’t update me on where the traffic is bottled up, it can’t comment on a song I’m listening to, or share something about the artist as the song starts.  And Facebook, by its very design, can’t possibly have the same one-on-one feeling in the car that good radio has.

Don’t be fooled by all the naysayers that insist radio is dead, and social media is everything.  Neither one of those is true.  They may SOUND true, but they’re simply not.  They’re incomplete thoughts, based on a dismissive attitude toward the best tried-and-true social medium in the world – RADIO.

It’s fine to use social media as additional ways to make contact with the listener, but that’s all they are.  For the foreseeable future, nothing’s going to replace radio.  That said, your challenge is to do something worth listening to when you open the mic.