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Any reasonable social marketer should be listening to their market. And you are listening to your market, right? You didn’t just add a bunch of people and start spouting off a sales message, did you? Well, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
How your audience reacts, how they click your links, what they say and what you say to them all has a major impact on the style of your social media campaign. You should be looking at your click throughs and website analytics to see which messages worked, which messages didn’t, and identifying who your biggest fans are. Knowing who your biggest fans are lets you leverage their loyalty- and reward it. Someone who constantly retweets or @’s your brand is someone you should be extending extra attention to so they continue.
But lets face it- if you’ve got a massive list and you’re following back everyone who follows you the numbers can get tough to crunch. You can be looking at a stream of thousands all day and find it near impossible to gauge true sentiment. There is software out there to help you with this- and its useful, but I’m an old school kind of guy and prefer to work “in the field” as it were. And I can tell by looking at someone’s Twitter feed how successful they’ll be with their efforts- In short, if you can’t guess how your audience feels about an issue then you can’t be flexable enough to deliver an impactful message.
If you followed a wide array of people with no coherent interests you’ll never be able to gauge your community and respond to their specific needs.
If you followed a select group of people you carefully chose by keyword use, retweeted posts and observing their feed then you’ll have a much greater chance of staying engaged.
In short- if you went and added a bunch of shmucks just to get big numbers then you’ve gone and shot yourself in the foot because you’ll never be able to talk to them because you won’t be able to listen to them. If you have 10,000 fans that you got by adding 20,000 and with whom you have nothing in common than there’s no hope for dialog, and you will fail. Epic fail.
But if you started with a handful of people whom you see eye-to-eye and grew your list organically through conversations and dialog- well then you’ll be able to chat with 10k people as if they were a single friend.
So think hard before clicking that “Follow” button- because even a big huge corporate brand can be sunk by predatory adding.
Related articles
- How To Adopt A Social Media Lifestyle (adrsocialmedia.wordpress.com)
- 7 Epic Uses of Twitter’s New Embeddable Tweets Feature (hubspot.com)
- Twitter For Businesses Part 3 (wealthartisan.com)
- Attracting the right attention for your business on Twitter (marketing.yell.com)
- Top 10 Tips to Tweet your way to 1000’s of Followers (socialmaximizer.com)
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Great post on learning how to listen to your market. I agree that It is not only about getting a feel for what the market is thinking, but also responding to them in detail to demonstrate that you are paying attention and value their inputs. This creates a valueable bond. Building a successful business is about building lifetime bonds and friendships.
Thanks Joslyn! Sometimes you have to do some basic “number crunching” but if you approach it from a community development instead of brand awareness standpoint you’ll be able to make some genuine sparks fly!