Recently, I have been exploring my analytics and revisiting my Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). What began to dawn on me as I attempted to make actionable sense of all this data was that I was falling into the same trap that most businesses owners do when looking at their social media performance. Many of my metrics and the things I felt good about were, in fact, vanity metrics with little to no value in growing my business or brand in a meaningful way.
As I contemplated my metrics, it dawned on me that my audience can be measured in two dimensions: width and depth. I have been primarily focused on the width of my audience. However, as I considered my KPI’s, including my conversion rates and meaningful interactions with followers, it dawned on me that what I really wanted was a deep audience over a wide one. The depth of one’s audience is related to how fanatical your fans are about following you. A deep relationship with your audience means that they regularly consume your social media content, they share your information with others in their network, they often recommend you to others, and they buy what you sell.
In contrast, width is just the number of fans or followers you have, most of which do not have a relationship with you or your brand and – they do not give a shit about what you are saying and are not willing to buy what you are selling. Frankly, for me, there is a clear difference between a fan that just follows me in the hopes that I’ll follow them back vs. the fan that visits my blog regularly, interacts with me on various platforms, and shares my content with others in their network because they find the content compelling and interesting.
Christopher Ryan of Fusion Marketing Partners is an example of a deep audience member. We correspond about topics related to marketing and he often reposts my blogs on his site, Center for Business Modeling. Another example is one of my Twitter followers, Integration Servers. I know they are a regular reader since they often retweet my content and they have more followers than they are following. It is deep fans like Christopher Ryan and Integration Services that a business like mine should be more focused on. I need to focus more on ensuring I give them the content they need rather than focusing on vanity metrics like the total number of likes or followers I have. This sentiment is summed up by the age-old statement: “Quality over Quantity.”
Are you focused on just getting more followers on your social media in your quest for a wider audience or are you trying to drive a strategy to develop a deeper audience relationship with followers and fans that care about you and your brand?
