Do you believe that social media popularity powers business success?
I think that’s one of the most dangerous pieces of Gravity Think around.
Why? Because social media popularity doesn’t equate to revenue.
Say what? All those Followers and Friends must be the key to success.
Of course we all think that way. We’re programmed to do just that. Years of Traditional Marketing Think. We’ve always measured email opens and click-throughs, direct mail responses and web hits. That thinking has us stuck in status quo thinking when it comes to measuring marketing success in today’s world of social media.
Here’s a question for you.
How do you know that any of those Followers, Friends, Connections, Clicks and Subscribers are actually your target buyers?
The reality is that we don’t know whether our social media audiences are, indeed, our buyers. Not when we first meet them.
In years gone by, we knew we were communicating with somewhat qualified prospects because we selected our targets – for e-mails, direct mail, telemarketing and more. We decided who we wanted to focus on with our marketing efforts, based on specific target profiles. We were in control.
In the world of social media, our audiences select us.
Read that again, please.
This behavior creates a major shift in the way we must view our marketing measurement in today’s world. When we focus on the Quantity of our Social Media audiences as a measurement of Success – we set ourselves up for failure.
There is no rule that says all of those Followers, Friends, Connections, Subscribers or Clicks are actually potential buyers for our solutions. In fact, they may be anything but potential buyers. They may be squeaky wheels, tire-kicking advocates or just plain lookey loos…
Quality Over Quantity
In the 21st century – the better measure of marketing success is focused on Quality, not Quantity.
Quantity is easy on social media. Thanks to a myriad of tricks and technologies you can grow your social media base. We can appear to be popular – even to ourselves. Sure, we can chat with big audiences that make us popular – but we also MUST have conversations with buying audiences to make us profitable.
Here are some questions to help plan your social media goals and tactics with a focus on Quality over Quantity.
- Who are our best potential buyers? What are their profiles, what do they care about, what information can we share that would be important to them?
- How can we create a community environment where our buyers want to connect directly with us? How can we attract our real buyers with our social media outreach to solve their problems, provide valuebale information and insights?
- How can we use social media to serve that buying community? How can we empower our buyers to share their stories with each other while also sharing their needs with us?
- How can we directly connect social media engagement with revenue – and use that as a measure of our success, instead of popularity?
I think it’s time we stop measuring marketing success as a popularity contest. That’s so high school.
Social media offers an amazing chance to communicate and share with our true audiences – the folks who have bought, or need to buy our solutions. That may mean (and probably will mean) a smaller number of engagements – but they will be rich relationships that drive bottom line results.
