Cashing in on ‘Friends’ and ‘Followers’
List building (the act of paying someone to recruit ‘followers’) is an impersonal business; but is now a reality on most social networks. The offer is simple - we (who understand how these sites work, when you who don’t) will help you build your Friend / Follower / Fan lists.
Ok, I’ve lost some of you, so let’s start on 1st base.
Social Networks: Friends, Fans and Followers
Social Networks are online communities where ‘members’ (you) have ‘followers’ - those real people who (for whatever reason) have either asked or elected to ‘follow’ your updates - those short and largely trivial actions you broadcast each time you ‘do something’ on a Social Network.
On Facebook these people are called ‘Friends’ (if they follow you), ‘Fans’ (if they follow your page), ‘Guests’ (if they’re attending your event), or ‘Members’ (if they follow your Group). On Twitter they’re called ‘Followers’; while on LinkedIn they’re ‘Contacts’.
It may not matter what label you use, but the point of followers is clear. These are the people who actually like you and want to be kept up-to-date on everything you’re doing, thinking or saying right now. If they didn’t why would they ‘follow you’?
Using Contact Lists
In business your contact lists include current and past customers, as well as the names and contact details of everyone who has made an enquiry or sold you something, down to people you’ve met at every business event, meeting, or conference you’ve attended. These ‘contacts’ may also include lists you have produced or purchased for marketing campaigns and have typically taken years to develop.
Regardless of how these lists have been constructed, they have a cost (in building and maintaining) and a value, which is usually measured according the conversion rate (i.e. sales) they deliver when you make contact.
It doesn’t take much to recognise these same lists apply in the Social Networked world, where they have potentially even greater value. Unlike your corporate list, which may identify and rank customers by value, on social networks you generally get unrestricted access to a lot more personal information. As a minimum this is likely to include a brief “bio statement”; but is more likely to include not only how they know you, but also who their friends are, what movies and music they like, the events they attend, the groups they follow, and even down to where they went last night and their forthcoming holiday plans. Given the amount of personal data you can now access, it is clear these followers have value and is why social network list building is now a commercial business.
But how do you value your follower list?
Cashing in on ‘Friends’ and ‘Followers’
While figures may vary it’s not unusual to record a 1% click thru on status update links; and has the effect of delivering real users to that site.
Let’s say you have 20,000 followers and each time you post an update 1% click on the link. That’s 200 clicks, or 200 eyeballs you’ve just delivered to this webpage. Now if you were to ‘value’ these eyeballs @ say 5p per visit, which is lower then a typical Pay Per Click campaign on Google or Facebook, then each status update is worth £10 (200 eyeballs @ 5p each).
OK, most of us have no way of extracting this value, but if your business is about selling products or services, then the more people who actually access this offer, the more sales you’re likely to make. If this wasn’t the case, perhaps you could explain how Google makes it’s money and what Facebook expects to do with it’s 200 million members.
List building services recognise this and make one simple offer - they will help your business to grow by growing your followers.
It probably doesn’t matter if this list building is carried by yourself, your PR or Marketing agency or provided by a software based service that selects new users according on an algorithm. The results are what matters and is ultimately what your list is for. The key question you have to ask is how you’re going value these followers. Personally speaking, while many of my ‘friends’ have limited commercial value, a select few are priceless.
Tags: Cashing in on Followers, List building, social networks, Valuing Friends
May 4th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Hi Greg
You tweeted to say this article was “in response to” my tweet in which I objected to a new follower trying to drive me to a website selling an “automated system” for getting me 20,000 followers.
I can’t really see that this article addresses that issue; you seem to start from a position that has no qualms whatsoever with clogging someone else’s timeline with adverts for systems that involve clogging someone else;’s timeline with adverts, and that concerns me.
Ecademy didn’t take long to turn into a sharkpool of pyramid salesmen (despite the exorbitant membership fees); linkedin will probably go the same way because of its guilt-driven system to make everyone recommend everyone else; I would be really really saddened to see the quite incredible communications tool that is Twitter become deserted by all the decent folk simply because people bought into this myth that you can build a business with no effort by getting software to sell other people on the myth that you can build a business with no effort by getting software to sell other people on the myth that you can build a business with no effort by getting software to sell other people on the….
Everyone keeps saying it, and it’s true: people buy people. Yes, it’s harder to spot a robot in 140 characters than it is face to face, over the phone or in an email. I have no problem with building genuine lists of people who are genuinely interested in reading your stuff. I do have a problem with being randomly targeted by people because they’re desperate to recoup the money they’ve lost to another spammer by spamming me.
Dave
May 4th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Do you know what the click through rates are from posts on Twitter?
May 6th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Dave, as I understand - on Twitter you select the people you Follow and it’s their updates you see. Anyone can follow you, but that doesn’t clog your timeline; in fact it’s a measure of how interesting and/or useful your updates are. A company such as Amazon, or an airline such as BA may have several million followers, who want to be kept up-to-date on product releases, offers, etc. CNN in fact has the largest number of Twitter followers, approx 1.4m; while the ‘un/official’ Coca Cola Facebook page has over 3m ‘fans’. This blog is about list building (the service you were complaining about), and how you go about generating more ‘followers’. I was not advocating this as a way to build your own Friend list; or to automate the selection of those people you’re ‘following’. The point of the blog is simply to ask, why have a large follower base if this has no value to you.
May 6th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Jason. Interesting question on Twitter Click Thru Rates. I found the following Blog on Tweetburner useful:
http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/2008/06/tweetburner-clickthrough-rates.html
This shows Tweeters with largest number of followers had the lowest CTR, around 4%, while those with fewer followers could get very high CTR. One Tweeter, with 7 followers, had 91% CTR. The answer I suppose depends on why your followers chose to follow you in the first place, and how useful your updates are to them.
May 6th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Thanks for that information.
It has not crossed my mind to sell click throughs from twitter as a service.
I use it tandem with other sources to gain traffic. It would be interesting to see the subsequent conversion rates / time spent on site / page open etc figures as well.