Not too long ago, people were still trying to figure out what to make of social media marketing. Around the world, thousands of digital marketing agencies were trying to grasp this new way of marketing in an open and public way. Many jumped on the bandwagon (still happening today) and created their precious Facebook Fan page and Twitter profile, but what do they do with those social media profiles?
After many hours of research, and many heated conversations, these people decided to add their profiles on all of their digital marketing materials such as their website and blog with the popular social media phrases of “Follow our company on Twitter” and “Like us on Facebook”. That will get the attention of others… won’t it?
Most of us in the industry for a couple of years know that the answer is no, that will really not do the trick at all, but lately, more and more people are thinking that running a “social business” means to only create profiles and announcing that you are on them will work. Most of time these people are practically begging their website visitors to follow and like them online, and then doing nothing if they did.
One of the most common social media sales pitches revolves around “listening”. Even though this is true, if you are not “listening” proactively and acting on your findings, what is the point?
Is your social media fans worth anything?
Before you sign on to your daily tasks in the morning and patting your self on the back about all your followers and fans, let me just explain to you that it really doesn’t matter how many followers or fans you have. Can you translate the number of followers and fans that you have in money? Are you generating any business out of them? How often do they talk to you directly?
- Content is not king, conversation is, but to start a good conversation, you need good content, so content is still king. Maybe a bit too confusing.
- The number of fans and followers are not king. Engaged ones are.
- Don’t measure likes, fans or followers, but the ones that you turned into brand ambassadors.
- 100 members of your community that are engaged is worth more than 5000 random people.
- It’s a good strategy to get more people to your community by providing them with prizes or incentives. Do you ever reward the people in your current community?
- The only thing worse about negative feedback and comments is a social media profile that looks like a ghost town. Stay active on your social media profiles.
I totally relate with you on this one Anton. Having a huge amount of followers does not really translate into anything, unless your are maybe a celebrity 🙂 I definitely prefer having a couple of hundred “engaged” people on my community than thousands of them that do not even “interact” with me. This part of your post has a good message: “Can you translate the number of followers and fans that you have in
money? Are you generating any business out of them? How often do they
talk to you directly?”
You are 100% correct. Quality over quantity!
I agree as well Anton and I use to be impressed with the number of followers or fans someone had until I had a lot and then quickly learned that they were only there to help their number base as well. They didn’t care anything about my content or interacting with me so I took the time to delete the majority of my friends from Facebook and my followers on Twitter.
It’s about quality verses quantity and you have to get the conversation going. I ask a lot of questions on my fan page and then I have conversations with my followers on Twitter as well. But it all starts because you’ve been adding valuable content to get them interested.
Thanks for bringing this to everyone’s attention and hopefully more people will come to understand that this isn’t just about numbers but more about being social.
Thanks Adrienne. You will be amazed by how many social media marketers uses the number of followers/fans metric to determine their success.