Dec
It's Not the Size, It's How You Use It
To be successful in Social Marketing, your goal should be never to have the most followers, it should be to have the most highly targeted followers.
In two days it will be the New Year. As we all know, along with the New Year comes last year’s lists. I usually look forward to these lists. Two lists I’ve seen recently were the top 10 people on Twitter and the top 10 influential people on Twitter. Both lists graded Tweeters solely on the amount of followers they have.
On one hand I have to say that if 40,000 people are following you, that you do have some influence in the Twitter world.
If Social Networking is supposed to be similar to being at a party (and I believe it is), then a party with 40,000 people is not a party, it’s a convention. Have you ever been to a convention? If you have, how many people at that convention did you actually have a conversation with? I’ve been to conventions. I usually find a group of people who is interested in learning the same things I want to learn and hang out with them. We attend the same speakers, hook up for lunch, then maybe exchange emails before we go home. Never have I gone to a convention and connected with every person there.
So how can you be influencial in your little corner of the internet when you only have a small list? The secret is to highly target your list. Don’t follow every person who you come across. I actually think you should have two Twitter accounts (you aren’t allowed two on Facebook). One account for giving, and one for receiving.
The giving account is where you will follow people who may make a purchase from you. They are in your target market. You should follow every person back so that you can have conversations with them when the time comes. Don’t use any of those silly rules I’ve heard about such as, only follow people with a picture, or only follow people who will follow you back. Because you are giving, people will naturally follow you back. And it doesn’t matter if they have a picture as long as they are reading what you write.
Remember the rule of giving – you give from the heart, you don’t give to receive. Don’t expect anything back from these people. Just keep giving and they will want to learn more about you. Where will they do that? Why, on your website or blog, of course. That’s where they will decide to make a purchase or not.
The receiving account is where you want to follow people who will give you information that you will share on your giving account. Find the people that are leaders in your industry, that regularly send out valuable content. You will always be “in the know” when you read their posts. They don’t need to follow you back since you aren’t engaging them in conversation. You may want to add their blogs to your feed reader so you can see what else they are talking about. The trick with this account is to not follow anyone who isn’t a thought leader in your industry because untargeted posts will only clutter up the pages that you are trying to read and add to the “internet noise”.
If you follow the give-receive method, I know that you will be as successful at Social Networking for business as the people with 40,000 followers.
