If you are building a social media audience for the sake of “reach” then you may be doing just that.
You have probably seen formulas like this:
#followers X #messages = reach
which are typically followed by a discussion the importance of “maximizing your reach”, with the implication being that “bigger is better” in terms of your reach number.
Is it just me, or does this sound an awful lot like the “blast it wide and often” approach that we used to hear related to direct mail campaigns? This approach to direct mail has proven to be less than effective for marketing professional services and I don’t think it will fair much better when applied to social media tools.
Rather than focusing on talking to the largest number of ears, we should be focusing on talking to the right ears (correct ears, I’m not discriminating against left ears) about things they care about.
Can I be effective only spending 20 minutes per day?
I recently had a conversation with a customer who had been told by a “guru” that it wasn’t possible to be effective by spending only 20 minutes per day using Twitter.
Regular readers here may be getting tired of hearing me say this, but social media tools are means of communicating – preferably conversations vs. one-way talking. If someone told you that is impossible to be effective spending twenty minutes a day talking to customers and referral partners, how would you respond?
When you hear these broad “truisms” being talked and written about, you have to remind yourself that the person speaking most likely doesn’t know your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy serves as the foundation for all of your marketing efforts, so it’s up to you to put any advice you read or hear into the context of your strategic marketing plan.
So if your marketing plan tells you that you need to cultivate meaningful relationships with 30,000 twitter followers, than you are obviously going to need to spend more than 20 minutes per day doing so. However, if your marketing plan calls for cultivating your existing relationships first while also meeting and connecting with your well defined ideal customer, I think you can be effective with those 20 minutes.
But don’t take my word for it – set some business related goals, make a plan, do the behaviors and measure your results.
Photo credit – by Kurt Wagner on Flickr
