Social Media: The Fallacy of Friendship
7 June 2010
In social media marketing, the more friends, fans, or likers you have, the more successful you have been in your social strategy, right? Wrong. The conventional wisdom in social media marketing – that you can never have too many friends – entirely misses the point of social networking: it’s not who you know that matters, it’s who they know.
The knee-jerk drive to grow fan bases (and to evaluate success by that simplistic metric) is a common consequence of not taking the time to define a coherent digital strategy with clear business outcomes.
A network of small intimate networks (your own social internet) will always deliver you a significantly better result than one vast pool of barely interested connections. Instead of measuring how many people you have in your inner circle, you need to look at how many you have two or three degrees of separation away. And in doing so, you need to look not at volume, but at value.
This is easier said than done. You can’t rely on the usual means for estimating the value of a network. That formula (value = 2n-1 or 2 to the power of the number of nodes minus 1) assumes that every connection between two parties is equally valuable. In this calculation, the value of a network increases exponentially as members are added. This is also true of a social network, so long as it remains a network and does not degrade into merely an audience. In marketing communication, the more people you are talking to, the more you move from conversation to broadcasting, and the less convincing you become.
As your immediate fan base grows, there comes a point beyond which your communication starts to hit rapidly diminishing effectiveness. With 20-30 friends, you are in a conversation. With 200-300, you might still be able to engage. But with a few thousand or more, you are back to 20th Century broadcasting. This is no longer social media marketing, but publishing or one-way messaging. And as we know, one-way messaging is, at its best, an ineffective form of marketing communication. At its worst, it is simply spam.
For many, the end result of social marketing activities is to expand the size of the audience with whom you can communicate directly. The goal is to rapidly generate leads that can then be fed into traditional direct marketing processes. While this may be a perfectly valid approach, it is a little like inviting a bunch of strangers to a party and then trying to sell them Tupperware. It is hardly going to lead to a mass improvement in loyalty, or in revenue.
Instead, it is important to seek to understand the structure of your networks and to identify the people whose networks are tight and personal. These people will be the most powerful objective advocates of your brand. Their immediate voice may not carry to thousands, but it will be heard and be taken seriously by their friends. And, in turn, those friends will carry the endorsement forward to their friends.
The size of the market that you ultimately reach is of course still important. But a networked market, in which your brand’s characteristics are passed from one person to the next to the next, is a much more tightly bound and inherently more valuable communication medium than a huge list of distant likers.