One of the often-debated points on social media is quantity vs. quality. Is it better to have a lot of random followers or a much smaller number of people who actually respond to something that”™s posted?
Personally, I believe there”™s room for both. I think it”™s very important to have a core group of followers. I also believe it can”™t hurt to have a larger generalized group of followers. After all, if any of them react to your post and make some response or take some action, you”™re way ahead. The only caveat is if their posts in turn are disruptive or very different from your original intent. (In that case, you can drop them.)
It”™s very easy to generate a massive number of followers or fans; you can buy them ”“ and it”™s not expensive. That”™s why Twitter, for example, set an unofficial limit on the number of people you can follow once you exceed 2,000. That number must not exceed 10 percent of the number of people who follow you. For example, you can follow 2,000 people and have 30,000 followers but you can”™t follow 30,000 people and have 2,000 followers. Most major social media platforms have some type of automated checking procedures and routines. One check from LinkedIn even extends to the number of accesses in an account from a particular IP address (i.e. geographic location). For example, if my LinkedIn account is repeatedly accessed by someone in India ”“ even with my approval, LinkedIn will flag it and probably shut down my account.
So what is the benefit of having all of these followers, fans or connections? First of all, it looks good. People are mesmerized by numbers and a Twitter account with 65,000 followers is certainly more appealing than one with 1,500. The same goes for the number of likes on a fan page, for a YouTube video and so on. The numbers attract attention. But if they were real, they would also produce results.
We recently promoted our Complete Webinar Training Course to two affiliates. One had a list of 8,000 names that he meticulously maintained. The other affiliate had a list of more than 150,000 people. It”™s not hard to guess which affiliate made more sales: the one with the smaller list ”“ and it wasn”™t close.
Social media marketing objectives have evolved to where the primary goals are brand awareness and improving customer engagement (followed by lead generation and website traffic). These objectives are manifest in quality, not quantity. Customers don”™t care how many likes you get on a fan page, they care about the speed and quality of the response they receive to their post.
That”™s why a recent study by ExactTarget reported that organic growth through regular posts and publicly answering customer service questions were two of the most effective marketing and audience retention tactics on Facebook. (Another effective marketing tactic involved product giveaways).
What much of this comes down to is customer engagement and the quality of that engagement. An engaged customer is worth far more to almost any business than the hundreds of followers or fans who are merely just part of a larger number that serves little or no purpose.
Bruce Newman is the vice president at The Productivity Institute L.L.C. He specializes in content creation and digital marketing. Most of his time is spent in the creation of content for webinars and their promotion, email marketing, education and social media campaigns for clients. He is also the creator of the highly popular The Complete Webinar Training Course. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
