If there’s one thing the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain understands, it’s quality. The hotel chain is known for its devotion to providing the best quality experience in the world: they’re famous for it, and they know that’s why their customers choose them.

That understanding of how important quality is to their customers led the Ritz-Carlton to put their Facebook marketing on hold a few days after launching their campaign in 2013, according to this Wall Street Journal article. While many companies abandon social media because they’re not getting enough fans, the Ritz-Carlton had the opposite problem: they got far too many fans, far too fast. Fearful that meaningful engagement was dropping while fan ranks swelled, the Ritz-Carlton team paused things, stepped back, considered a number of factors, and moved forward with a strategy that kept their customers in the center of the conversation.

To do this, the Ritz-Carlton team changed what metrics mattered most to them. Rather than getting hung up on the numbers of fans and followers they enjoy – not only can these numbers be easily faked, but for a prestige brand, there’s always a danger of false inflation as people who don’t even have the vaguest possibility of being your customer still ‘like’ your page – they shifted their attention to tracking mentions and identifying the value of social media conversations, looking for ways to better serve their customers.

Look for other brands to adopt this approach to social media, particularly as Facebook takes further steps to stifle the organic reach of posts in an effort to drive advertising sales. Does it matter if you’re reaching 300 people with your content or 3000? Or does it matter that the 300 people you do reach are impacted significantly enough that it strengthens their relationship with your brand and motivates them to do business with you? These are the questions that we, as business owners, need to figure out. Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Or to take a page from Ritz-Carlton’s book: Quality matters!