Virtual Domination Does Not Equal Millions of Fans
I think for many now jumping on the social media bandwagon, one area of measurement is based on the number of fans that one has. In some cases, it’s great to have hundreds of thousands of fans—IF you can lead them to click throughs on your site or directly track them to retweets of products and services or sharing via Facebook (from all of your friends to their friends and so on…). But many are, as in life, “fair-weather friends”: they come, look around, sign up…but don’t really engage or connect. Especially when you don’t have a strategy that is going to ensure that you connect with them for a direct call to action. Yes. You want a call to action. One that includes a mutual passion for the give and take that is going to be SHARED by your business and the friends/customers you are going to friend and follow.
Seth Godin wrote a post on Monday Feb. 15/10, that speaks to just this very topic. He says, “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.” Eeeeeek and ouch is RIGHT! Some businesses and people are so busy trying to build an army of fans that they forget—or don’t even think about—the strategy for a call to action that would ensure more then the 25 clickthroughs that Seth received in is experiment.
The moral of his great story and of this post: make sure you spend the time on the great ideas and actions, rather than the army of followers. Let those great ideas do the SHARING!
Best Nicole
Viral growth trumps lots of faux followers
Many brands and idea promoters are in a hurry to rack up as many Facebook fans and Twitter followers as they possibly can. Hundreds of thousands if possible.
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.
Check out the graph on the left. The curves represent different ideas and different starting points. If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That’s yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.
On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That’s not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.
But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That’s the purple (of course.)
A slightly better idea defeats a much bigger but disconnected user base every time.
The lesson: spend your time coming up with better ideas, not with more (faux) followers.
Great post, I bet a lot of work and research went into this article.