Quality over Quantity

A lot of people that I chat to about social media emphasise their wish to grow some mammoth social following, oblivious to the fact that it will most probably be comprised of a highly diluted concentration of lazy non-engaged users. I wince each time I hear/see this; your follower count is totally irrelevant to the bigger picture. The importance that companies place on ‘vanity’ metrics is a huge irk, and the value of them needs to be reconsidered.

Anyone who has sat down for a chat with any Adduco team member will have probably heard us passionately pitch the argument about how your ‘like numbers’ are total bullsh*t. You’ll either have already ‘purchased’ likes/followers (sometimes through legit sources, sometimes not so legit…) or wish to ‘purchase’ followers. When you post something to a ‘bought’ audience, they’re not really there; you’ll be getting no engagement because these followers are either fake or they couldn’t care less about your posts. Numbers are only ever important if the following actually consumes and engages with the content.

What you want to be driving is an engaged fanbase with a high-concentration of advocates and listeners. For example you have built a Facebook following of 1,000 people over 6 months (it may take a good strategy and some man hours), you say ‘Go watch this vid on our new Youtube channel’ and 750 of them click over to it – you have a valuable, engaged user base.
Meanwhile you can run an ad or purchase likes from a shifty source, end up with 1,000 different people in 6 days and do the same thing – we’re not the TAB but we can almost guarantee that you won’t even have a couple dozen click-throughs from that. My point here is, is that you could have all the followers in the world, but that number only matters if they’re actually acting on your content.

Social media is all about sharing. So whether you have an audience of 60 or an audience of 600,000 all it takes is one of those users to click, share, retweet, like to start the chain.

When you get to posting, think about whether you would genuinely consume the content yourself. Is it something that you would click on? Is that offer something that you would really opt into? Everything that flies off your desk/status box needs to be compelling for your fanbase. Totally throw the ‘impressions’ metric out the window – unless every single impression leads to a sale, it means nothing.

As an (not terribly well-suited) example, adduco featured in a news article last month which spread around to reach 300,000~ people. It resulted in only 90-something enquiries/messages/hello’s, an engagement rate of 0.03%. The audience was huge, so therefore we received the vast number of impressions but because only a few were drawn to the content, the engagement rate was far lower.

If you want your following to click, tweet, like on your content you need to be zeroed in on capturing their attention. Think about how each impression translates it’s way into a conversion/click/like/tweet/etc. From there, you’ll very quickly discern which networks you should be posting on and how often you should be posting there (we’ll talk about this in another post one day!). Take that, and build your content into that. Don’t stretch out some half-baked drivel into 6 Facebook updates a week – no-one wants to interact with that!

Focus your social channels on becoming relevant. Become interesting, tailor yourself to capture the attention of your target audience while still telling your story. Concentrate on growing your brand, rather than growing your follower count.