If you stop reading now, you"d know what I know about growing an audience. Only, I owe lots of words and I have to give you something to chew on, so here goes. There"s a bit more to it, obviously, but that formula is actually what I do.
Quality over Quant.i.ty.
Whenever I talk about audience in an open forum such as Google+, at least two people per post say, "But it"s quality and not quant.i.ty." These people are almost invariably graphic designers or customer service representatives. They are never from sales, marketing, or finance because those organizations understand the simple math of sample size versus response versus committed sale.
Yes, it"s not that useful to build a huge audience if the majority of them aren"t responsive and don"t interact with your posts. For reading and interacting, it"s much better to be prudent with your choices about whom you follow. Connect only with those people who add value and enrich your online experience. If you want to sell something, that is rarely a luxury you have.
You need to have an audience of some size so that you can continue telling the story, spreading the word, seeking relationships, and ultimately influence sales. Cold and simple-having a larger audience helps this effort.
Measuring the Size of Your Audience.
The number you"re looking for resides on your Circles page, up at the top, and it looks like Figure 9-1.
Figure 9-1 The size of your audience.
At the time of writing this book, 41,504 people added me to their circles, meaning that they opted in to receive my posts. I"ve circled 1,455 people. This is partially because I"m selective about who I follow on this social network and because Google+ has a 5,000-person following limit. I"d like to hold on to those slots for as long as I can.
Who puts you in a circle is the number you"re looking at to determine your audience. In addition, you can track how many shares and +1s your comments get. These are "in-system" metrics, meaning that they mean something while you"re inside Google+, but they don"t translate directly to typical marketing metrics. The number of people who have you in circles on Google+ is not the same as the number of people in your email prospects list.
People can choose to circle you and then choose to ignore your posts. This is worth knowing, but it"s not worth worrying much about. You"ll know by your level of engagement whether people pay any attention to you after they comment on a post of yours or share it.
Google+ makes it even more interesting to consider the size of your audience with its Extended Circles, which are the circles of the people you"ve added to your circles. Please don"t close the book. I"ll explain.
If you are Dave and you have circled Shashi, when you select to share information with your Extended Circles, what you"re saying is, "Share this piece of information with anyone in Shashi"s circles, too." However, this ends up showing up in Shashi"s friends" "Incoming" stream, which isn"t a widely read part of Google+.
Trying to measure the true reach and audience behind your posts and efforts on Google+ is difficult. If you want to keep an eye on a number for tracking purposes, track the following: * People who have you in circles * Number of comments per post * Number of +1"s per post.
* Number of shares per post.
For out-of-system metrics, you must determine whether calls to action are part of your posting strategy (talked about in previous chapters) and then specifically track from that. If you use Google+ for community management, consider tracking call volume, call handling time, time to resolution, and any other non-Google+ stats. The numbers that matter to you most should be out-of-system, but you can keep an eye on a few metrics while looking to grow your audience.
Value Your Audience.
The a.s.set most companies undervalue is the connection with other people. Sales professionals know that they are only as good as their email address book (or Rolodex) (and then the ability to close), but in most other professions, the importance of building a network of any value is rarely directly measured or rewarded. And yet, that"s where a great deal of your business value can be derived.
Referrals are gold. There"s hardly a business that doesn"t count referrals from past customers as the #1 source of new and valuable leads. Yet most companies overlook the importance of building a network and instead place emphasis on traditional advertising methods, hard-sell outbound marketing (in email and direct mail), and sales-only interactions (versus relationship-based marketing).
You need to build an audience that matters to your organization (no matter the size). I won"t answer the question of who should be in your audience. You would know that better than me. Your audience should be composed of people related to a topic, region, wealth, or some other demographic that you know. It"s hard to segment people on Google+ in those ways. (Although the third-party site findpeopleonplus.com certainly gives it a try.) It"s up to you to put together and understand the dynamics of your audience.
You should also build an audience that"s useful to your business goals. More important, you need to turn your audience into a community. You need to express to your audience that sustainable, relationship-minded business is important to you. If you seek strictly transaction-based selling, you won"t get the results you expect.
Further, third-party applications do not help grow your audience on Google+. Agencies and other consulting groups might offer services to help with this kind of thing, but at this point, they are strictly manual, and the value of this type of service is suspect. Ask for a sense of the methodology used before choosing to accept anyone"s offer of this nature.
Sales are important to business, as is marketing, especially referrals. However, treat your community in a way that makes these seem secondary to your mission. Engage your community, and we"ll agree on the best way to treat your community.
What Interests Your Audience.
If you treat your audience right, it will appreciate you and perhaps even become a community within which you partic.i.p.ate before you ever ask for anything. That"s the best possible outcome. But before discussing this further, let"s talk about what I mean by "community."
I use the term "community" gently because most people tend to think of a community as a static thing with boundaries and numbers. They look at how many people "like" their Facebook page and think that"s the number. They look at their email list and think that"s the number. They see how many followers they have on Twitter and how many people have circled them on Google+ and think that"s the number. However, community is a lot more fluid. It"s actually only the active and lurking (but attentive) people who count as your community.
Following are some of the reasons people give for following other people: * I follow people who have filled out a profile and have a picture. If they don"t take the time to fill out a profile, why should I care about them?
* I follow people who get mentioned by other people I follow. If you"re mentioned in a post and I check you out and you"re interesting, I add you to a circle.
* I circle people if I"m interested in what they post.
* I look at people who leave interesting comments on other people"s posts. If they can hold up their end of the conversation, I circle them.
* I want value. If you"re not sharing something of value, I won"t circle you.
* I want personal takes, not just your business thoughts.
* I want interesting and original, not just reshared information.
These responses reflect what many people consistently say. In short, people want many different things, and everyone is of a different mind about the criteria for selecting who they put in which circle.
These might seem like common sense, but many business professionals (especially those in larger companies) using Google+ often get more than two of these recommendations wrong. For instance, several company employees do not fill out their profiles, making it vague about where they work within an organization, and throw off warnings about whether to trust them. In other cases, I saw that two-way conversations weren"t happening much for representatives of companies (including two different owners of smaller businesses), never commenting back on the questions and conversation starters that interested potential community members left on these people"s posts.
Everything your audience is interested in matters.
What Community Means to People.
When you ask people on Google+ about what they value in communities, the answers are far more consistent and focused than you would think. It"s useful to think about this because growing an audience is one level of connection, but growing an engaged community is even more ideal. Aim for community if you value a relationship with your buyer that lasts beyond a simple transaction. If you simply have the "one and done" mentality, an audience can suit you. (Although I rarely hear anyone freely admit that they want only transactions and not relationships.) A community, in the eyes of the people I spend time with on Google+, is a two-way medium. If you want to build a stronger audience, you must spend time commenting on your posts and on other people"s posts. Several people indicated that you should take the time to talk back to people.
In the blogging world, you have to be the #1 commenter on your own blog. It"s also true of Google+. We talk a bit more about commenting in a moment.
Bring a Campfire.
Another important part of community is that you need to bring a "campfire." You need something for people to gather around to talk about. A campfire can be a shared interest, a common goal, or something collaborative.
In advising larger companies, I often point out that it"s hard to build a "Sprite" community (no offense to that delicious lemon/lime beverage) because the people who drink Sprite don"t have a lot of reasons to gather simply based on beverage choice.
Not all beverages are created equal. If you"re Jones Soda, for instance, your campfire might be about the shared photos on the bottles. If you"re Moxie soda, you might have a regional appeal. (I"m from Maine, and if you"ve never had a Moxie, it"s this acquired taste that the majority of people who taste consider to be horrible, but many folks love and cherish.) The campfire for car enthusiasts is obvious. I used to own a Saturn (five of them over a span of years), and the company did a lot to promote that folksy feeling. I now own a Camaro and their online communities (none of them run by GM) are full of pa.s.sionate enthusiasts who talk with you endlessly about details that would make anyone"s eyes glaze-even manufacturers. But that"s the campfire.
So, if you want to attempt the community route, come up with a campfire. If you"re a travel company, it"s fairly easy. If you"re a soap company, maybe your campfire is talking about the home spa movement, which doesn"t exist, but you can launch it. If you"re the UPS Store franchisee, maybe your campfire is the local small business community angle for your region.
Connecting People Is Key.
Communities where people spend their time are those that help them connect to other people who share their interests. I wrote about this in Trust Agents, saying that a trust agent works to "be the elbow of every deal." You can do the same thing on Google+.
If you"re the person who points out the interesting people that share great things, you can have a growing following. The more you can share connections and contacts without asking for reciprocity, the more likely you"ll be in positions that can later prove useful.
This is something most people do naturally (and well) offline. If you play golf, for example, you know that it"s the conversation over that course that makes the day wonderful. The game itself is the campfire. But business people don"t just play golf for the love of the game. They use that time to build and strengthen relationships and to share contacts to seed future business.
The same is just as true online. It"s sometimes difficult to master the nuances, but observe others, and you can gain a sense of it. This chapter has plenty of the nuances you should explore. Connecting people is a vital part of the game.
The Time in Between Is Important.
Another element of growing your audience is continuity. People want to hear from you (or the leaders of your community) on a fairly regular basis. They want a sense of their online "place" being familiar and "known."
In these busy times, many of us cannot gather face to face as often as we would like. We travel for business. We scratch out time to be with our families. We work on our own pursuits. So, getting together as often as we"d like falls fairly far down on the priority list. After the financial downturn of 20092011, many companies forcibly cut back business travel, which is a perfect reason to build stronger online communities.
Continuity enables conversations you"ve had in person to continue online. Using tools such as Hangouts you can invite other parts of the company into the conversation. You can gather neighborhood businesses for a quick mid-day meeting without requiring anyone to leave the stores. This need to keep a "place" alive in between meetings works for all sizes of businesses.
Familiarity and continuity help people feel connected in between those isolated events. For instance, if you make gourmet cookies, and you decide to build your community around the campfire of "gift basket design," you might share videos from your in-store seminars and then invite others in both your offline and your online community to partic.i.p.ate in posts you put up related to this. It"s a way to move the online and offline conversations into a continuum that can prove useful for that sense of sustained contact.
You Are a Media Company.
Communities want content, which isn"t too far afield of the campfire premise. However, in this case, the audience you build wants unique information consistently posted. They want information, stories, videos, ideas, and conversations about the campfire that holds your community together.
Building an audience requires a rather consistent stream of this. Most of the examples in previous chapters suggest posting two to four times a day on average. It also means commenting on other people"s posts, sharing other people"s posts (but not as often as you create your own), and connecting with the people you build relationships with online.
This takes time. It can take up to an hour a day (perhaps broken into two 30-minute slots). Some people and companies devote even more than that per day. Try different tactics and investments in time and measure the results (how many people click through, how many comments, how many +1"s, or any other in-system metrics) to see what is effective.
Make Your Buyer the Hero.
People in your community want concepts they can adapt for their own use. They want ideas that improve their own world. "Make your buyer the hero," is a phrase I use quite often that applies here. Concepts and tactics (or recipes or something similar) are what people want from you.
I started blogging in 1998. It took 8 years to get 100 readers. The reason was that Really Simple Syndication (RSS) wasn"t invented and blogs weren"t popular. (We called them "journals.") However, the reality I stress with new bloggers is that I hadn"t yet learned to write for my readers.
It"s the same in your efforts to build an audience. If you write about yourself and your products and how great you are, only you can benefit from that. If you create interesting posts with concepts and ideas for your community to take so that they can improve their own experience in life, you have something.
Sailing the High C"s of Audience Building.
It all comes down to the letter C: * Community: It takes precedence above audience.