How to make social media matter
“It’s not who I am… but what I do that matters.” – Batman
Twitter followers. Facebook fans. LinkedIn connections.
Here’s a bold assertion: none of them matter.
I’m being a bit facetious, of course. They do matter; from the perspective of a marketing funnel, they are all at or near the top of the funnel, and without any people at the top of your funnel, everything else breaks.
That said, what people do is more important than who they are. 50,000 followers on Twitter aren’t worth a thing if they aren’t helping you advance your goals. 10,000 likes/fans on Facebook are meaningless if no one ever shares your stuff or buys something from you. Even if your goal is purely community only, 100,000 community members who never talk, log in, or interact are still valueless. Even “brand names” are largely meaningless. It’s nice that Jason Falls follows you, but if you don’t ever engage with him, he’s as valueless to you as someone with no followers at all.
So how do you get people in social media to increase their own value and start contributing to the business or organizational goals you’ve set down? How do you get people to take that next step down your social funnel from being a warm body in the room to being someone who will advance your goals? Simple (remembering of course that simple is not easy):
1. Tell them what to do.
This sounds so obvious as to be laughable, but examine any handful of websites, newsletter, or storefronts and you’ll see an absence of calls to action. You don’t have to be Billy Mays loud, but you do need to be obvious. There’s a lot to be said for the big red button. There’s a lot to be said for telling people what to do (nicely) because most people, deep down, really want you to. Want someone to share a link or retweet something? Ask.
Bonus bit of human psychology: if you give people a reason why, even if it’s not especially compelling, they’re more likely to do so.
2. Show them how to do it.
If you ask people to do anything more complex than push one button (and even that’s up for debate if they can’t find the button), there will be a percentage of your audience that simply doesn’t know how to do what you want them to do. As tasks increase in complexity, the likelihood of people doing them decreases proportionally. Make your audience a video, put obvious guides everywhere, make a manual that’s mostly pictures, but show people how to accomplish the goals you want them to achieve. There’s a reason why some of the best Facebook Page designs have a big arrow pointing to the Like button.
Here’s an interesting thing to try: in the next survey you have with your audience about your products, services, organization, or what have you, make sure one of the questions is about why you haven’t done X action yet, and be sure one of the answers is “I don’t know how”. Then be surprised at the number of people who select that.
3. Remind them frequently to do it.
Again, obvious but we forget. In the ADHD-riddled online world, you need to remind people what to do – and often tie that back to the previous step of how to do it, if it’s any more complex than just pushing a button.
There are more complex things you can do on top of these basics, but this is the starting point for converting all of those large, largely valueless social media numbers into concrete, tangible results that move your business forward.
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3 Questions About Your Top 10
Here’s a very simple experiment you should try if you’re promoting something via social media or other digital marketing channels.
Go to your Google Analytics. Go to Traffic Sources > Referring Sites. Look at the top 10.
How many of the referring sites in the top 10 are platforms you are actively promoting on?
Now ask yourself this:
How much effort would it take for #2 to become #1? What would you have to do differently? In my case, I should actually attempt posting to StumbleUpon more than once in a blue moon. It’s the dark horse in my mix that could move the needle if I actually tried. If I put the spurs to my activity on StumbleUpon, it’s very possible that with a minimal amount of effort, it could become my top referrer for traffic.
Next ask yourself this: what other sites or platforms could I make some use of that I’m not actively leveraging at all, but are still showing up in the top 10? For example, Chris Brogan sends me decent traffic even though I haven’t done a guest post for him in ages. It might be worth my time to ask if he wants one. Would one guest post move the needle from #7 to #6? To #3?
Last set of questions. Do you have goals and goal values turned on?
Look at the top 10 or 25 referring sites. Look for the outliers that are pouring cash into your wallet right now. Are you promoting on them or are they profitable dark horses? Or are you inappropriately focusing your time on sites that deliver traffic but no real business value? How much would you move the needle if you added a little more juice to the big dollar converters that are in your referring sites report?
Everything you need to understand what’s moving the needle for you and your business is already in your Google Analytics. The opportunities are in there. Go find them!
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How to become an authority
Everything from social reputation to search engine optimization has lately been hinging on this fuzzy concept of authority. Let’s make it a little less fuzzy.
Authority is derived from Latin, from auctoritas, which is in turn derived from augeo, which means to augment. In it’s most classical form, an authority is someone who sanctions, authorizes, or cultivates. You augment someone else’s stuff, by declaring it legal, by recognizing it, and through your influence, getting others to recognize it. Where your authority comes from depends on the context, but for marketing (as well as political) purposes, authority is influence given to you by the people around you.
Google has long used inbound links as the metric of judging who has given you influence. The more people who link to you, your works, and your content, the more authority has been invested in you by other people. These days, Google and other search engines have broadened their own understanding of authority and influence to include social media. Authority now not only includes what links to you, but who.
So how do you become an authority? How do you begin to have people give influence to you? At the risk of being trite, you have to have something other people want, something other people value. For example, we are swimming in data right now. We have far more data than we know what to do with. Who has authority? Someone like Avinash Kaushik, who doesn’t have more data, but has ways of helping you understand the data you do have and turn it into something useful.
Mitch Joel isn’t the world’s best social media practitioner. Far from it, by his own admission. What he does have is the ability to see large trends, macro perspectives, and then write about them in a way that is accessible and understandable. He’s done this for decades, and he’s been an authority in his fields throughout his life.
Chris Brogan’s self-confessed “secrets” are common sense, rephrased and recontextualized so that you understand them in the marketing, social, and business arenas. For people who can’t make an intuitive leap from one arena to another, his value to them is that guidance over the chasm, and people grant him authority for it.
Do you see the trend here? The authorities are not the folks necessarily inventing stuff (some are, of course), but the folks who can take stuff that you have, that we all have, and transform it into something useful and valuable. So the question is, what do you have in terms of skills, abilities, access, connections, ideas, or talents that can take what you have now (and you have quite a lot) and transform it into value that other people want?
One tip I give with great frequency for finding that value is to look back at your childhood. What things did people value about you when you were a kid? There are personality traits that are so deeply ingrained in us that they’re a core of who we are, but time, society, and work have obscured those traits to us and made us forget who we are at our core. When I was in second grade, for example, we started to have computers in school, and I knew without a doubt that they’d be a big part of my life from then on. I was good at using them, but I was really good at helping other people use them and get value out of them. Fast forward a quarter of a century, and what people value me for now is pretty much the same thing, because that core trait is still in me. Instead of trying to be someone I’m not, I put who I am and always have been front and center.
Bonus: it’s really easy to do what I do now, because all I have to be is myself and who I’ve always been. I don’t have to master being someone I’m not, and by being who I’ve always been, I’m taking advantage of decades of mastery at being me. That’s incredibly freeing, and something I hope you find for yourself. As my teacher Mark Davis says, study something old (your past) to learn something new!
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Empire Avenue is an Awesome Social Pyramid Scheme Game
Updated: Jim Durbin pointed out that I was doing it wrong, so I’m taking some of his cues to bang it around more and see what I missed in-game the first time around. Expect an update in a week or two.
How to arbitrage data and become a leader
If you’re unfamiliar with the word arbitrage, it means this:
In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.
If you extend the idea of arbitrage – uneven levels of supply and demand that benefit someone who can transfer supply to where demand is – then data arbitrage is the idea of taking information from information-rich areas and moving it to information-poor areas.
If you can develop the practice of data arbitrage, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a valuable, profitable skill that few other people have. Let me give you a couple of examples to jog your brain.
Here’s a tip I often cite in my Blue Sky Factory email marketing lectures. Suppose you are responsible for your company’s email newsletter. Rather than just guess randomly at what might be a good subject line for your newsletter, why not search for the words you think people would be using on Twitter? Let’s say you’re writing a newsletter about financial aid, which was my old career. Hit up Twitter search and suddenly it becomes clear what people are talking about right now.
- FennellaMiller: College process almost over , reviewing financial aid
- ashCiERA: need to go see what my financial aid looking like for the summer.. !
- jshureb: Bitin’ the bullet and sending back the financial aid letter………………..
There’s a very good chance people will respond more favorably to the words and language used by their peers rather than by something you just dreamed up one afternoon, which will in turn make your newsletter much more successful. In a very short amount of time, you’re taking data from a data-rich environment (Twitter) to a data-poor environment (your company’s newsletter) and achieving results that other people in the same role do not.
Second example: maybe you’re responsible for writing blog content for your paper business. You need to know what’s going to get people’s attention. Again, rather than just guessing or slapping together posts randomly, you head over to Quora and see what the hot topics are in paper.
- Why are legal pads always yellow?
- Is using 100% post-consumer recycled paper worth it?
- What sort of things could you do to make your business card look unique, especially if you’re hand-making them?
- What is the name of the process where a logo or text is pressed into paper?
People are asking questions, many of which you presumably have the answers to. You’ve got blog post titles and articles pre-written for you based on the questions people are asking, and as a bonus, you’ve got an audience primed to hear the answer once you’ve written it, since you’re answering their question! You’re arbitraging between a data-rich environment (Quora questions) and your blog (no questions), and then back again from your head (professional knowledge) back to Quora (people who want answers). Your blog will have content people are looking for, and as a side benefit, there’s a good chance you will achieve some impressive SEO results, since you’ll be using phrases people actually search for.
The lesson is simple: look for areas where information is rich and areas where information is poor. Find a way to broker that data between the two areas and at the very least, you’ll become an authority in the data-poor area, if not a community leader. If that community is your target audience, then there’s a good chance you’ll develop plenty of business from it as well, and at no cost other than your time and information-brokering abilities.
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