Is a Social Media Follower Worth More than a Registered User?

The question is posed:

Is a Follower on Social Media Sites Like Twitter|Facebook Worth More than a Registered User for Your Service?

I believe he or she is. Because our traditional genetic|societal common sense compels us to “hold on to things“, we all have a tendency to fetishize things we feel like we “own”. In the case of contact information, many value an email address over any other form of contact. A “friend” on Facebook? A “follower” on Twitter? A “subscriber” to an RSS feed? Are these types of relationships really as valuable as the relationship formed with an email address? Are these followers on Social Media really worth as much as a registered user who provided their email address to use your service, or receive your newsletter?

I say yes. Even though the average click through rates (CTR) on Twitter is 4%-54% and the average CTR for email is 2%-12% (for B2C) leads us all to instantly acknowledge the better average/min/max performance of Twitter over email marketing, I think we should ignore click through rates in our present discussion because so many factors influence performance of CTR. I’m also going to focus on Twitter instead of Facebook|Myspace|Youtube|Vimeo|Plurk|etc. to save time, space, and focus.

The value of growing and maintaining community on social media to complement building and email contact list is not visible until you grow and maintain it. The value is the community instead of the simple contacts. People using social media tend to share things. Social, remember? Coupled with a sense of community, conversation in social media will evolve into a veritable echo chamber. The message reverberates and repeats. The message is retweeted. Shared. With Social Media (like Twitter) message is treated as a social object. In contrast, with email, the message is more often treated as a transactional object. Kept in an archive if read. Nobody else can see the message. Which leads us to the next big benefit of communicating with followers over social media: transparent, interlinked relationships.

If you’ve been in sales or marketing for any meaningful time, you’ve definitely heard of relationship selling|marketing. The relationship in this model is often kept behind closed doors. The transparency is on your phone bill or in a few folks memory. By communicating over social media, you put your relationship in terms every web user and every search engine understands: hyperlinks. Think about communicating entirely over Twitter to all your followers. Each tweet including a hyperlink back to your message on a page on your website (instead of lost in an email). All that exposure. All those impressions. Thousands of people seeing your message. Marketing bleedover. And not just social media marketing bleedover. Search Engine Marketing bleedover, too. Remember, the links shared on Twitter will be indexed and influence SERPs rankings on Google. And obviously on Twitter’s search.

In addition to community and transparent hyperlinked relationships (which impact SEO), another big benefit to social media communication is the permanence of the message instead of the perceived permanence of the contact. Messages on Twitter have permalinks. That means they are permanently linked. Email communique’s are often deleted (about 75% of the time, they aren’t even opened [don't quote me though]). A tweet doesn’t need to be opened. It is permanently there, visible, improving your SEO ranking, branding your business. Sweet.

Finally, I almost always use my Boxbe email address when registering for a service, which means I never ever hear from services I register for via email (even when they try to contact me [I'm a jerk, I know :) ]). Contrast that with my opening every communication that heads to my Twitter profiles and Facebook profile.

Before I go deep down this road, I’d be honored to hear what you think. Do you think a follower on social media is worth as much or more than a “traditional” registered user for a web service? If not why? If so, why? Preemptive thanks for your contribution. :)

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