If you want to be successful online, then building a social media following should be one of your top priorities. But there is a misconceptions some bloggers have, that success can be determined solely by the numbers.
For example, in email marketing, they say the more subscribers you have, the better your chances are at selling more products. In blog readership, you get more traffic because you have that many more people that are subscribed to your RSS feed when you publish a post, therefore helping you gain more attention.
But It's Not All In The Numbers
Numbers in a Social Media Following
So you want to be successful and you think that building a social media following will get you there. Great. How many people do you think it would take before you started to make enough money online? 1,000? 10,000?
When in reality it's not in the numbers at all! It's in the interactions and engagements. It's in the way these fans see your updates in social media that makes you successful. What type of success are you looking for? Most of us are doing this for the almighty dollar, and that's ok too, but some have a perverted sense about how they're going to make that money, and they forget about the fans on the other side of the update who are seeing their posts.
Why have 10,000 fans on Facebook if only 5-15 people interact with you on every update? I would rather have 1,000 engaged fans than 10,000 non-engaged one's.
And you can see the point I'm making, but we still have an idea in our head about numbers, and if we could just get a certain number of fans we could be successful!
The magic beans of social media
No one can really tell you how to build an engaging social media following. You can search this term in Google and you won't find the secret sauce because it differs for each person and the niche they are in, the content they're creating, and so forth. But recently, I have spent six months of highly extensive research into what happens psychologically when you post an update and was really surprised to see that I stumbled upon something that not a lot of people understand.
How To Engage Your Social Media Following
Instead of posting links all day to Facebook and Twitter (or any other platform), try stepping out of the box. Try using social media tools like Buffer or PostPlanner to schedule your posts. Facebook pages have the option to ask a polling question to your social media following, post an image, or simply write whatever you want in that little white box that's not just for links. Do a test and ask a question and see how many people answer you. Are you getting the results you want?
The end result is to get traffic, sales, and readers to your blog.
Here's what I mean; take a look at this video from Ms. Ileane about Linking Your Facebook Profile To your Facebook Page
But the first step is in getting them there through your social updates. If you're one of the 250 people that have bought my new ebook this week, then you'll already know that emotion is a great way to create engagement in social media. Find what works for your readers!
In the update itself, this is where you, and you alone, can either trip yourself up, or draw people to you. There is something that I discuss in the ebook called reticular formation. One example of this would be if you lived by the railroad tracks and the train came by blaring it's horn in the middle of the night but you didn't wake up because the reticular formation has trained your brain to drown out certain things that you're used to.
On the other hand, that same process can wake you out of a dead sleep when you hear an unfamiliar “bump” in the living room while you're asleep!
Same goes for your social media following
What's the first thing you do when you get on Facebook? Just like everyone else, if you're going to browse, you scroll until you find someone familiar to you. Someone you trust. You may not know that you trust them, but subconsciously, you do and don't know it. That's why you stop at their updates.
Your fans are no different. Their reticular formation has conditioned them to stop at people they trust or know, someone who is familiar to them. The main premise of what my ebook is about is to help you “bump” people out of that conditioned state of mind and cause them to engage you!
Anyone can build fans and followers. There are simply hundreds of tools out there that you can use to your benefit to help you climb the ladder of raising your following, and I don't dissuade anyone from trying these tools either! You've got to find what works for you, but these will simply help you build the following, not build engaging followers.
Engagement is the key to a successful social media marketing strategy on any platform. Numbers mean absolutely nothing in social media. It's how your fans and followers interact with each individual update that you post is what's important!
If your social media following is not interacting with you, then you need to work on getting them out of that mental state that they're in. They don't trust you yet. Build trust by showing people you're human like them. If all they see is links coming out of your social media account, they don't know the difference.
Post some funny pictures! Do a contest! Upload a picture of you doing something stupid and let them see that you have a sense of humor!
Because if they're not responding, then you're not doing something right. Anyone can build a social media following, but a true business person understands how to take that social media following and create an engaging group of true fans.