Make More From a Smaller Social Media Audience

I heard someone this weekend crowing that he had "10,000 Twitter followers." I don't believe that guy (but I didn't check since summer family BBQs are not the place for cold, hard analytics) but I also think he doesn't realize that his 10k followers is probably less than 2k legitimate listeners and a lot of lurkers or potential spammers.

Social media pushes the numbers of followers or contact or friends to the forefront, that is easy to make this mistake, but social media really isn't a quantity game. It's a quality game. Audience lists, just like sales databases, need to be managed for quality leads.

Following are five tips for "pruning" your social media audience to create the most value within your feed.

Make sure you know who you're talking to:

By using a nifty tool called
followerwonk.com, I was able to determine for free that an app builder with 5600 Twitter followers who is targeting physicians only has 221 users who list in their profile that they are physicians, or work with physicians. Some are employees, some may be the owners' uncles cheering them on, but 96% of their followers will never buy their product because they are not on target.

It is so easy to accumulate followers that the numbers can be seductive, but be smart here. The best value internet marketing offers over traditional media is that you can very narrowly target your message and reduce "wastage" on your media buy. Social is still a media buy, even if your intern is running that effort because there are time and creative costs. 

Twitter and LinkedIn have clearly been targeted by spammers so:

1. Run a followerwonk report on your followers; ask for a report on how many followers have your important keywords in their profiles or in their own feeds. Consider that number to be your core audience; the big number of followers really doesn't matter to you.
2. Look for followers who have few tweets, or they don't have followers. These are lurkers or potential spammers; they are not buyers.
3. If you see users dominating your conversation with porn or off-topic remarks, repeats of the same remarks, report them as spammers and get them out of your feed immediately so they don't turn off your core audience.
4. Put it in your plan to manually approve new followers to keep your follower base clean. Train new contributors on this point; if you have an agency, make sure this is a tracked performance point.
5. Manually go through and report suspicious users as spammers. It will take some time if you haven't done this work already, but it is worth it.

When you know you are talking to only your target, and their influencers, your sales conversion per follower in social media channels will be much more impressive. And having focused discussions makes it easy for your audience to engage with you.

The benefits of pruning your follower base to its core audience are clear:

1. Your audience will recognize that your feed has valuable content.
2. They will know who is really leading the conversation.
3. They will be more confident to post their own comments and questions, which obviously improves the highly sought-after "engagement" metric.
4. If they ask a question, you will be more likely to see it and act on it. Customer service is more frequently being handled online and you don't want to overlook a serious customer with a real problem you know how to solve.