Day 19: Darwin’s Three Rules of Social Media Marketing

I am now up to 390 followers. According to twitaholic, http://twitaholic.com/, the number 1000^th most followed Twitter account is Maria Rita with 258,715 followers. So I have only 258,325 to go.

In my quest to become one of the most followed Twitter accounts I have also began to really explore and learn how to use the other popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Obviously these other networking sites can help me with my goal, but there is so much more potential. In 2010 Facebook hit over 600 million users. LinkedIn hit 90 million and Twitter was at about 195 million. Those of course are huge numbers of users and access to that many potential customers is any salesman/marketer’s dream.

As a marketer/salesmen, how do you take advantage of that kind of potential? I’ve read many blogs and articles on ways to promote yourself, company or product using social media. Each article is written by a so called SMM guru, and each one has a different approach. I find myself asking the question, “Which one should I to follow? Or should I follow a little of each?” Because there are so many different techniques and strategies I don’t think I would ever be able to follow them all, so I had to come up with a way of filtering each approach to find the ones that would best meet my needs.

I’ve been in sales now for about 14 years, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that the only things that really matter are results. With that mind in mind I developed three SMM rules to help me evaluate the approach and advice I will take as I move toward my Twitter goal and as I build up my social media marketing campaign. My rules are as follow:

1. It doesn’t matter what you have to say if no one is listening.
2. It doesn’t matter if someone is listening if you have nothing to say.
3. It doesn’t matter if people are listening, and if you have something to say, if you can’t collect the data on who is listening.

Based on these rules I have developed a strategy for getting people to listen, having content for them to listen to, and finding ways of collecting data on who is listening. So how will I do that? Good question. I’ve a pretty good plan to start with, but I am sure it will evolve overtime. Because each of those rules requires a lot more explanation, I plan on blogging about each of them separately over the next few weeks. That will give me time to try a few different strategies, and so when I write the blogs I hope to have some actual results to report.

Until next time.