After now spending over a full year diving into the social media world, I am confident in saying, “I get it.” It definitely took dedication and a few mistakes to figure out what really got my audience to respond but I am finally at the stage where I know exactly where my audience is and what tone to speak to them in.
When I first began, I had assumed they would be waiting for me to engage them on facebook, twitter, and linkedin…how very wrong I was. Not only did I have to find them (my industry’s social media of choice is LinkedIn & Twitter) but I had to figure out how to get them to hear my marketing messages. And that is where I feel I am able to now say, “I got it!” If there is one thing I have learned it is: how important it is to build your Reach/influence.
I consider ‘reach and influence’ two words that go hand in hand in social media. Yes, reaching numbers looks good and yes reaching a mass amount of people with a message is considered a win in most marketing initiatives. But in my opinion, without influence, your reach is futile.
For ages, marketing has pushed for reach in the form of newspapers, television, radio, etc. What social media has that these other mediums never had, is to bring the communication back in full circle. This is where you need influence. If you have not only reached your customer with your message but successfully influenced them, they are likely to give you immediate feedback in the form of comments, re-tweeting, or recommending. With the format of twitter, you can blast a message out to potentially thousands of users in seconds. One comment from a follower with 1,000 other followers takes that message even further, and so on. The web of possibility is endless.
More often than not, I see a company blasting out marketing message after marketing message…but it’s senseless. Who cares how many people’s newsfeed your message came up on if not one person has stopped to look at it?
Think about it; once you categorize an email as SPAM, your eyes just tend to glaze over those emails every time that company emails you. The same principle works in social media. Once someone sees your name/picture, and they have categorized your messaging as marketing only, the spam goggles go on and they can’t see another thing you write. It’s difficult to change this perception so it’s really important you build your presence accordingly so you avoid this.
Here is where the 5:1 rule really comes in to play. ONLY push out ONE message to every FIVE you create in participation with someone else’s posts. Comment, ask a question, or retweet 5 messages to every 1 that you put out of your own. Participate, participate, participate. By communicating with your audience you are building relationships and inviting them to communicate back with you. The messages you put out not only have a much higher chance of being read & recommended, but they will be apt to do so in future messaging as well.
To help show the way I think reach and influence on social media is best achieved, I put together a cycle to follow below:
Basically this shows the way I found most effective in adding to your reach while achieving the influence you need to build your following. If you notice, participation is in between every step because you need it to lead you through the cycle and to each step.
It’s pretty incredible to watch your audience start responding if you follow the above, especially on twitter. Just following people is not enough. Follow them, tweet with them, voice your opinion and don’t forget about them. Staying consistent will make you reliable and earn you loyalty among your followers. That’s it beauty of social media – the ability to endlessly receive feedback and create connections that will add mounds of value to your marketing.
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