Photo by Twitter user Charl22
HubSpot recently wrote that “reach” (your number of Twitter followers and Facebook “likes”) is the number 1 way to measure social media ROI, saying:
The number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members, etc. you have is directly related to your social media success.
Perhaps the folks at HubSpot haven’t had much time to look at Twitter lately. (They do seem to be busy writing whitepaper after fact-heavy whitepaper[1]; they have so much to share with us.)
I wish they would have expanded on this.[2] Because I find it hard to believe.
Twitter: Follow Me (Blindly)
The thing is, Twitter is full of accounts who follow other people with no intention of ever reading their tweets, ever.[3] Many are powered by programs which automatically follow anyone deemed to be part of their target audience (usually determined by whom they’re already following), or just indiscriminately follow everyone, blasting the follow-shotgun drunkenly around in all directions. The thing is: They don’t care about you or your tweets; they’re only hoping you’ll follow them back so they can do one or all of the following:
- Advertise to you.
- Appear to be some kind of Twitter big shot with oh-so-many followers.
- Sell the account, with its 10,000 followers, to someone else. (Yes, these services exist. I’m not linking to them.)
There’s also no shortage of people who do this manually, over time — people who follow thousands of other users. There are not even enough hours in the day for them to read what their followers tweet.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with following a gazillion people on Twitter, or that it’s misusing the service. What I’m saying is: obviously, many many Tweets go unread, and that fact does not jive with a belief in an ROI-predictive “reach” which is based on a number of followers. [4]
Facebook: You Really Like Me?
Like us on Facebook, and get this coupon! When we reach 3000 likes, we’ll donate to this charity!
How many Facebook campaigns attempt to motivate people to like them for reasons other than actually liking their product or service? (Many, from what I’ve seen.)
Is there a good chance this person is going to want to chat with you and other passionate users about, let’s say, mountain bikes (yeah, your company sells mountain bikes) once they’ve clicked whatever they had to click to get their Starbucks coupon?
Because, if not … well, how is this more valuable than just buying a big list of email addresses from some shady company, and firing up the spam cannon?
Give me a big stack of coupons, or freemiums[5], or funny kitty videos, and I’ll give you a big stack of Facebook “likes.” Even if you’re giving away something relevant to your business, all the “likes” in the world won’t mean anything if the people don’t actually, you know, like you. It does not mean all your future updates and messages will “reach” them It only means you’ve paid, in time or money, to get their attention for a few seconds: a convoluted, expensive advertisement.
Can We Get Around Reach, Please?
Followers and “likes” are not true measurements of reach. A company with 500 followers, 50% of whom are engaged and interested in their product, has more reach than one with 10,000 followers where only 1% are interested. And how many of each company’s followers are computer programs? Self-promoters just looking for a follow-back? Imaginary hot chicks “lookin’ for cool people lolz”?
“Reach” in the sense the word is being tossed around is actually how many people theoretically could have seen your message. (And by all appearances, quite a few people didn’t.) It’s not a useful metric; it will not help you determine whether you’re wasting your time not.[6]
Anyone who dedicates time and resources to “focusing more of your social media efforts on generating new fans and followers,” as HubSpot recommends, should first ask them (or anyone else, for that matter) to connect the dots and show the causation (not correlation) between more social network pals and success. My fear is that it actually works in reverse, and that fans and followers are not the cause of successful social media use, but can be a result of it.
But then, I’m not a marketer, so by all means: set me straight.
PS[7] – Sorry about all the footnotes! I just re-read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and it must have had an effect!
Technically, what Hub Spot is says is true. If you see social media as another broadcast medium, then there are only a small percentage of visitors who care, and who will buy. But, you don’t know which ones. And, because the “cost” to someone of Liking or Friending you is small, you have to fish through an even larger number of yawners to find those that are really interested.
I recommend that you get your social contacts to join the network that even Twitter has now joined: email. Everything that happens on Twitter now generates an email. Why? Because email is a better way to engage your audience. It’s better than Twitter (and Facebook).
People who give you their email address are committing to something more than just a Like.
Join the biggest social network on the planet — email — and start having meaningful conversations with just the right people.
Agreed that social media is just another broadcast medium. But I still don’t agree with what the article said — that “the number of Twitter followers … you have is directly related to your social media success” — is true.
I think you nailed it with the phrase “meaningful conversations.” Obviously, a very high percentage of relationships on Twitter are not “meaningful”. Followers is not the right metric to look at. It’d be like running an email campaign and bragging not about how many people responded, but to how many people you sent the email to.
People talk about reach because that is how ROI of social media can be quantified for those who insist on quantifying it. Of course the only real measurement is cold hard cash at the end of the day. But how many people listen to you can be correlated to how much money you get, depending on how you engage with your followers. Consider that Amazon did not make a dime for the first five years of its existence. It was building followers, community members, listeners. You cannot expect to just push a button and have money come out when you haven’t taken the time to build up community, and provide value. Amazon recognized this. Can you?
Think of it this way. You used to buy billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, to get “reach” which somehow (people were hazy on how) would get translated to sales, AS LONG AS YOU KEPT PAYING FOR IT. Now you can have conversations on social media, and it costs in your time, but you get customers, and when you pay for it, it doesn’t work as well.
Consider Sean, that if we have a business, we must be creators. What we used to contract out to a media company, we now do. We broadcast when we tweet and post our blog posts. And we are all media companies because of this. This concept comes from Shel Israel’s OpenForum.com post.
http://www.openforum.com/articles/why-your-small-business-should-act-like-a-social-media-company
Shel Israel is the author of “Twitterville,” a good book about how small businesses use twitter to get more clients and customers.
So if you have 10 twitter followers, that’s the size of your broadcast network. Just because someone is not necessarily seeing what you tweet doesn’t mean that they will never see anything that you tweet. When you mention them, they will see that. And the more you participate in twitter chats (which broadcast media can never do) you’ll see more people following you, seeing you as a resource, engaging with you. This is called Building Social Capital. Like putting money in the bank, eventually you can take it out again, with interest.
With a blog, people may not comment, but they are going to be reading your words and drawing conclusions on what you can provide for them.
Think about it. Ever time we go on the internet we have a problem we’d like to solve. Maybe it’s to entertain ourselves. Maybe it’s “How can I get more customers and more money?” Whatever it is, whatever your area of expertise is, you can help people and provide value for them. Your answers, given over time, show again and again why they should connect with you, and eventually, as Brian Massey says above, get on your email list, where you can convince them to buy. I agree. The email is the best way to get more money for your business.
It would be helpful for you to read books about how building social capital, social media followers and email can help you succeed in your business. I did, and it was very educational. When you’re always learning, you can continue to be an even greater resource for people in your network, which will make them know, like, trust you and buy if you ask for their business. How do I know this? Because I’ve done it.
Mazarine
http://treyzsocialmedia.com
I think we mostly agree, Mazarine; maybe I was confusing. What you said, “how many people listen to you can be correlated to how much money you get” makes perfect sense. My point is that, on Twitter, obviously, a lot of people are not listening, and have no intention of listening. Many of the followers I listed in my footnote will never see anything I tweet, because their motivation in following me is (transparently) not to read anything I tweet. So HubSpot’s claim that how many followers you have is an indicator of your “reach” makes no sense; it’s obviously not that simple. It’d be like saying an email campaign sent to 1000 random people is guaranteed to generate more leads than one sent to 100 people who signed up for it.
Pingback: More On the Crapping Up of Twitter: I Am Not Alone | Sean McCleary Thinks About The Internet