How many friends, connections, or followers do you have today? Is it enough? How do you know? Is 500 enough or do you want 10,000…or maybe 100,000? This is a question I get asked all the time by companies when they start talking about social media strategies. Let me help you change the way you might be thinking about this issue…forever!
Somewhere along the line, people got the insane idea that to be successful in using social media you have to amass a ton of people. Let me kill this notion once and for all…it isn’t what social media is about and isn’t how it should be used to achieve success.
Having tens of thousands of people connected to you, following you, or friends (maybe Likes) on social media won’t get you results UNLESS they are the RIGHT ONES and unless they TALK ABOUT YOU with others. Let me repeat this because it is so critical to understand before continuing to read…Unless you have the right people connected to you who are your advocates, embrace what you do and are willing to talk about you on social channels (and say what an incredible experience you or your business offer), social media won’t deliver you the results you want.
Let’s do some math on this to see how it really works. Let’s say you have 1000 friends or connections or followers and you are wildly successful at FRIEND COLLECTING and grow this to 10,000. If no one talks about you or shares what you are doing with anyone, you still have 10,000 people connected to you but they are mutes, they aren’t saying anything to anyone. Ask yourself this question, “How likely is it that word-of-mouth will spread about you or your company with this huge list of people. Answer…NONE!
Now let’s look at FRIENDING. What if you “FRIENDED” only 100 friends or connections or followers, only 1/10th the number of your competitor who has 1,000? However, your 100 love what you do, the experience you give them, and how you help them by sharing your thoughts and insights. In fact, what you have to say is so compelling and interesting they can’t wait to share it with their friends, connections, and followers. And let’s say they aren’t that social and only have 100 people following each of them (the average person has over 500 in reality).
And let’s say some the majority of these are shy and only half share it with their audience. That means of the 100 people in your audience, 50 shared to their audience (100 people for each of them). That says your message has now reached 5,000 people (50 x 100). But here’s the GOLD NUGGET in this analysis. Your people SHARED it with their audience and they TOLD THEM this was something great and they should read it! This type of word-of-mouth is what makes it important why something actually gets read. Now let’s say only 10% of this group of 5,000 people (500) who got the message liked it and shared it to their audience of people (remember, only 100 in each audience). The math says that you now reached 50,000 people (500 x 100). Again, they received it because someone who is TRUSTED in their network shared it. Since we are talking numbers, you might want to know that 90% of the people purchase based on the recommendation of others!!
So at the end of the day, it’s your choice. You can either “FRIEND COLLECT” and spend your time and money amassing the initial 10,000 people who don’t care about you and don’t talk about you…or you can start “FRIENDING” 100 people and end up reaching 50,000 people who actually care about what you have to say and are talking about you via Word-of-Mouth. It’s your choice today…create a strategy for FRIEND COLLECTING or invest in a strategy of FRIENDING. This is Word-of-Mouth on STEROIDS…
