Many of us use twitter regularly, communicate with friends on facebook, and read blogs. I learn a lot from these networks when I find good providers which account for less than 1% of the total. But, since the world wide web encompasses all states, regions, and continents of the world, that less than 1% accounts for many amazing providers — and that is all I need.
Your followers are not human
But, what people don’t realize is that most of your followers are DORMANT, useless, or not targetted to your industry. Some of your followers might not even be humans. They could be robots. Maybe you should tweet about what type of oil to use, and you will get more robot followers.
Assessing the value of your accounts
How do you assess the value of your social media accounts for your business? Do you talk to your followers? Do your new clients say, “I found you on facebook”? Do your analyics suggest that your twitter account is driving your SEO positioning up on google even though few people actually click on your links to articles embedded in your tweets? I hear all of these things regularly. So, social media is helping me in all types of ways, but the analytics are deceiving, and the good analytics are not obvious.
Yes, Twitter makes a big difference
The good news is that yes, twitter is helping my ranking on google. Yes, Facebook gets me tons of new clients. Yes, we have great discussions on Facebook. But, oh my god, only 12% of my followers are in my specific industry? Is that high or low? Is that normal? Oh my god, I average only two clicks for each blog article I promote on my twitter with 2500 followers? Are my blogs boring? I think they are really interesting. Hmmm.
Clicks are more than they seem
What I learned is that those two clicks per average article are actually like gold. I learned that those are comparable to a multi-million dollar client purchasing his initial $20 purchase from your company. There will be a long succession of $20 purchases every week for years to come. Yes, the $20 looks small, but 52 of those per year os $1040, and in five years it is $5200. Hmm. It all sounds better now. I learned this from STOPPING promoting a particular twitter account. My blog traffic tapered off a lot. I don’t have the exact analytics of how many exact referals I got from Twitter in a particular month. But, if I lost 40 referrals, my traffic went down by 200. The numbers simply didn’t add up. So, I learned not to look at how many referrals I got. I learned to look at what I was doing on Twitter during a particular month, and how my top line blog statistics were for the next 90 days. Delayed reaction is a huge consideration in web analytics.
Everything went limp
STOPPING TWITTER outreach for a few months was the best thing I did for my business. Not because Twitter was not working. It was for the exact opposite reason. I realized that my blogs lost traffic, my site lost traffic, retweets went down, and many analytics for my business became stagnant the minute we stopped outreach. I didn’t realize how powerful it was, especially when you assessed the value of monetizing the results.
A Novice would have been fooled
PEOPLE LOVE our Facebook much more than our Twitter. A novice web-preneur would be fooled and invest more in their Facebook account. Mistake. Google is the one in charge here, and they are much more impressed by success on Twitter. Why is this? Twitter is hard. No matter what you do, the response is minimal unless you are a seasoned pro. Getting interaction is like sucking a bottle of water out of a rock in the desert. If you can get interaction and growth on Twitter — you have skill and value in Google’s mind, and Google is really smart. We can all learn from Google. They don’t necessarily publish what they value, but ask the experts and study your statistics and you will learn what they like.