How Valuable Are Your Social Media Contacts As Targeted Auto-responder Leads For Your Business?
Social media has hit the Internet by storm over the past few years but a lot of people
are still wondering just how much their social media contacts are worth. It's not a big deal for people to have more than 1,000 Twitter followers, but the problem is that in most cases those 1,000 followers hardly ever convert into solid auto-responder leads.The biggest problem so far with social media is that most internet marketers got caught up in building a massive amount of followers without bothering to set up the proper metrics to determine how valuable their followers actually were. Using social media to attract followers who are not highly targeted leads is really a useless, time wasting operation.
The truth is, there's a very good chance that most of your Twitter followers don't have the slightest clue who you are. Most probably just followed you hoping that you would follow them back.
Even so, some reports have estimated that a social media contact is worth up to $3.50. However building solid relationships using social media is more of a one-on-one task if you want to be truly effective.
Let's take a look at some other popular internet marketing communication methods to gain a better idea of how effective social media contacts are.
List building, the most obvious method of communication, has been around long before the internet thanks to the use of auto-responders.
Building a list of auto-responder leads is now done mostly via an email form on your business website or landing page instead of collecting business cards as in the pre-Internet age.
An IBM study reported that a single loyal email contact is worth just under $950. This is a much higher figure compared to social media contacts and it is due to the fact that when someone signs up to your list, they are trading personal information for something else, normally a free resource of some kind.
Each list subscriber is therefore a targeted lead - i.e. someone who is interested in what you have to offer. This instantly sets you up for a more personal relationship, which is a major reason that a person on your list is worth so much more than a Twitter or Facebook follower.
Blogging lies in between your social media contacts and your email list in terms of value per contact.
Subscribing to your blog's RSS feed takes someone only about two clicks, which is a lot faster than subscribing to an email list but slower than following someone on Twitter or Facebook. Therefore, it's no surprise that your RSS subscribers are more valuable than Twitter followers, but less valuable than someone who has subscribed to your email list.
Another reason why blog followers are more valuable than social media contacts is because you have a chance to make money (even if it's just by selling advertising space) every time that they visit your blog. With Twitter or Facebook, if you don't get them to click on a link and purchase a product, you won't make any money.
You can draw two main conclusions from this, and neither of them involves ditching social media.
The first is that you must get your social media contacts to take another step past merely following you in order to convert followers into targeted auto-responder leads so you have a much better chance of monetizing them.
It's important that you get your followers to sign up for your blog's RSS feed or email list. Both would be ideal. This will give you a greater chance to build a long-lasting relationship with them, and of course, monetize them better.
The second conclusion is that while social media contacts can still be useful, they should not be the backbone of your marketing efforts. You have gained credibility among the community by having a strong social media presence, which can be leveraged and monetized in a variety of ways that are not directly tied to your Twitter followers or Facebook friends.
by: David Hurley