Faux followers
A lot of these fans and followers are faux. Sunny day friends. In one experiment I did, 200,000 followers led to 25 clickthroughs. Ouch. —Seth Godin
This is excellent advice for small businesses trying to figure out how to best use social media (if they even should). The goal is not to talk at people, but to talk with people. Simply having fans or followers does not equate success. This noise can change the language and tone of businesses who could have otherwise reached truly interested people. Don't focus on the faux followers.
3 Comments Add your comment
Brad C February 15th, 2010
It was about a year ago, I launched a shiny new website to house my comic strip. I remember a few days later a designer with a lot of clout tweeted about my site and linked to it. I was so pumped, he had 5000 followers and many of them were going to see my brand new site... I was more than a little disappointed to see only 23 visitors came between the time he tweeted and when I check my stats an hour later.
Anthony Broad-Crawford February 15th, 2010
It all boils down to how "your" customers listen and like to be reached. Do this research first as you may find out your best invesentment may be the local newspaper or yellow pages. Blindly investing in "social media" may be a waste of money and time. If you are a small business time and money is something you cannot afford to waste! So do the research to find out your most effective or opportunistic channels and invest there.
Nate Klaiber February 15th, 2010
RE: Brad
Yah. I have been through that before, too. I have had several reviews on Slashdot, several articles on the front page of digg, and a few other traffic surges. For the most part, they were just that - surges (with the exception of Slashdot, which gained more subscribers). It's not about the quantity of people - but the quality of people. You want to get in front of the people who want to listen to you, not just get in front of everybody.
RE: Anthony
Agreed. It's funny to me that many of the businesses I have talked to have a Twitter or Facebook, simply because no one else in their industry was doing it - or because some 'social media expert' told them they needed it. It was wasted time and energies that could have better been spent actually reaching their target audience through different methods.