Social Media: Why less is more and WHO you SHOULD be paying attention to with fans and followers

Social Media has a lot to do with psychology and it also has to do with the game of numbers.

If you apply both of these to twitter and Facebook, you can target who you should be paying attention to aside from influencers.

One of the things I don’t think businesses do enough of is to pay attention to who is following them on twitter and fanning them on Facebook. Administrators on Facebook can get less information about a fan, then viewing people’s profiles on twitter, but many people on Facebook have not set their privacy settings to maximum, so you can at least see how many people they are “friends” with, some of their page likes and when they are online the most.

Now the less is more strategy.

While someone having less friends on Facebook means information that you produce on your fan page has less likely hood of getting shared to more people by the fannee; the flip side of that is that once your page is fanned, updates from the fan page to the fannee have more of a chance to actually get seen and eyeballed by the fannee, as they are only reading updates from 200 “friends” as opposed to someone with 2000 “friends”.

The same applies to twitter. A follower who is only following 132 people is more likely to see your twitter posts then a person following 100,000 people.

On twitter especially, this is the time to engage with someone. Don’t SELL! Suggested reading: Inns and the Art of the DM (direct message) http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/inns-and-the-art-of-the-dm-direct-message/ It applies to any business using twitter.

This is the time to introduce yourself and make conversation with them, say hello. Don’t blindly follow everyone back, check them out, if they are just posting about themselves or trying to sell something, I would suggest ignoring (but that’s up to you.)

LOOK at who is following you. Are they making conversation? Talking to others? An occasional sales message is ok (in my book) but just like what your own tweet stream should be, don’t make it all sales.

Some of the most engaged people I have seen on twitter are ones with less then 300 people following and being followed back. Quality over quantity.

Think about it, if someone with 150 followers and followees is active on twitter, and say they have posted 5000 times, they probably followed you for a reason. Jump on it! Strike while the iron is hot and engage with them.

Curate potential customers.

A Facebook fan can generally be sent a personal message privately (if their privacy settings allow it), but make sure when they comment publicly, engage with them, even if its thanking them for a “like” on a post. Get to know a little about your fans and followers.

Don’t just make your fans and followers be just what they are, fans and followers, convert them to customers and future potential customers. Pay attention to the little guys, they can become your biggest real in person fans and help spread the word even better.

One higher engaged follower/fan is worth more long term then hundreds of unengaged followers/fans.

So while your message has the potential to be spread further with a twitter user with higher follower/followee counts, or a Facebook fan with a lot of friends, your message has more of an opportunity to get lost as well in the information stream.

Social media is the soft sell. Convince and Convert, (via Jay Baer) Stop Marketing, Start Engaging (via Scott Stratten) They are words to live by in Social Media.