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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Why Tech Journalists and Bloggers Write About Twitter
Why do so many tech journalists write about Twitter?
Why do so many in the media write about Twitter?
Responding a little to Rex Hammock’s article, Twitter is the Only Thing Worth Blogging About, I think so many in the media — especially the tech media — write about Twitter in order to gain more followers on Twitter. The more followers on Twitter one gets, after all, the more people will see future headlines from that media source. The more people will click through to the content. The more web celebrity. The more potential for ad revenue. The more “loyal visitors.” The more readers of future blog posts and articles from referral traffic. Just an observation.
Let’s ramble. Getting Google insightful:
Searches for all things Twitter have grown exponentially on Google. Lots of people are searching for a smart writer’s posts on Twitter. Let’s take a look at what shows for one of the top twitter searches on Google, “what is twitter”:
255 Million Results. That’s 10 times more results than I get for “what is helium 3” (which is something we should all care a lot more about :). Let’s take a look at how being on SERP 1 helps a highly relevant blogger’s domain, Tweeternet, increase it’s traffic.
Notice the correlation? And if you click through on Tweeternet, you see links to the creator’s Twitter Profiles. Pretty brilliant. Though most folks don’t put in the extra effort of optimizing a page for a search query (sniper philosophy), but take a broader long-tail approach (shotgun philosophy). Probably makes more sense, and the comparing the results of either approach, long-tail seems to work out better. By directing web traffic to a journalists Twitter stream, and “capturing” a visitor on the growing social media site (via the follow), the journalist has capitalized on the growth of Twitter itself. Once the hype over the microblogging platform subsides, BOOM, the blogger’s got a long-term follower instead of a one-impression reader.
Bloggers write about Twitter so much because it increases their follower count. Once the hype over Twitter subsides, that journalist has readership he or she can reach over Social Media. Directly. No need to gamble as much on successful SEM campaigns.
Are you a blogger or journalist who writes about using Twitter? What do you think?
Thanks! You can follow me on Twitter at @glennisaac.
The War for Social Network Domination Will Never Be Won
The Recent Battles for Social Network Domination are over, But the War is Never Won.
Crowds move. Tastes change. Technology Changes.
Conversation moves. The Internet is fluid.
Friendster to Myspace to Facebook and Twitter (current winners of the battle).
Lots of niches. Mashable. Virb. Plurk.
The War for Social Network Domination never ends. It will never end. There will consistently arise new entrants at the height of current technology. Indenti.ca. Friendfeed.
It’s a lot like infrastructure, generally. China has fiber optic cable. Connection speeds there are far faster than what most of America has. America was built on copper wire. Why? America was first. Technology evolves. Systems change.
The Point. New social networks will be invented. Join them. Enjoy the early adopter status. Redesign your old web based service. Redesign your old blog. Don’t be afraid of change. The Internet is Fluid. Ride the wave. Join Facebook. Join Twitter. Experience them while they’re on top of their game. Connect with your friends there. Meet new people there. Thrive.
(Ok, I know this post is a bit of a rant. LOL. Any clean up of these thoughts in the comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! :)
To Understand Viral Media, You Must Experience Viral Media
To Understand Viral Media, You Must First Experience Viral Media.
To get a better understanding of how people are going to experience your product or service, you’d probably do some work to experience it yourself. Testing it. Going through the process. Getting a feeling for it, outside of theory. From actual experience.
You have to experience a thing yourself to achieve any real understanding of how others experience that thing.
I think this thinking extends beyond the generic “product” and “service”. Down to the behaviors people have, and relationships people have with products and services. Most people, for instance, didn’t understand why Twitter would take off. Even why people use it at all. “Why would I care about what so-and-so does every second?” Ahem – that’s not the only way to use twitter. Experiencing it helps one better understand how to use it for more important things. Like Gavin Newsome using Twitter to announce his run for governer. Obviously not so mundane.
Share and Share Alike.
Understanding the possibilities of something requires an intimacy with that thing. I think the same thing goes with stuff like “viral media.” If you’re interested in viral media, or getting your stuff shared and spread by people. If you’re interested in sparking conversations, and gettting the crowd to distribute your content everywhere. You have to share things yourself. You have to email your colleagues great, highly relevant articles. You have to get a twitter account and RT great, highly relevant things. It’ll become apparent what motivations “the crowd” has for sharing content when you’re part of the crowd.
We must become the change we want to see in the world.
Think I’m right? Think I’m wrong? Leave a comment.
