TL;DR: Social Media might not be that effective – are your “friends” actually listening when you post things?
I’m starting to get skeptical about the power of each of us being a publisher. Prizzm (the parent company for Mightbuy.it) was founded on the theory that as each person has broader and broader reach via social media platforms, the impact on businesses will increase from each customer. The theory says tools should be built for customers, for people, that allow them to broadcast more clearly their intentions and opinions when dealing with businesses, and connect to each other based on publishing that way. This theory is built on top of the existing social web. It depends on the fact that we have (mostly) all become publishers.. which you have if you have a blog, fb, or twitter account – or even LinkedIn.
But who’s listening?
I’ve found something uncomfortable, which forces me to write this down, start the discussion. I need something from my friends – TODAY. A vote on Vator Splash for a startup competition. So I published an article about it, on FB, LinkedIn and Twitter.
On FaceBook I have 289 friends, Linked in 500+ professional connections, and Twitter 339 followers. I posted a request on each, explaining I need a vote. I expected the biggest return from FB, as these are my personal friends, and need a favor.
The audience the post is most suited to is LinkedIn – but I know when I post something there people don’t necessarily see it as many don’t log into LinkedIn daily.
I also posted to twitter.
The results: Only 3 votes that I can attribute to these posts over 11 hours. On the other hand, was chatting with a friend on skype, asked him to vote, took less than 30 seconds. The tally, so far:
- personal request: 1
– works, and fast, but requires pinging each person
Social media request: 3 – out of 1800 theoretical .
It’s only been 11 hours since posting, so I will update the tally through the day. But I don’t think it is the outrageous nature of the post, that people need to carefully consider wether they will help me, effort or money which caused it to be totally ineffective.
There could be slight optimizations – I posted on Sunday night.. primetime for me on the social web, but others might not be listening. There are whole startups focused on optimizing publishing times on Social Media, I recommend and use Buffer for that.
So why did nobody vote when I published? It comes from a number of factors. A published, impersonal request, even to your friends suffers the tragedy of the commons, most reading it figure somebody else will do it. Another thing is reach – who actually saw these posts? On FB, I might be able to tell. On LinkedIn, I’d expect very few, at least immediately.
UPDATE: As the comments below show, many people noted the poor usability in the request as an obstacle. If you ask for an action, make sure it is easy.
So it would have been better to post it with some fore warning. On twitter, I don’t expect any followers to actually see my post, or follow a link, or take an action. They barely know me. And in the background, an avalanche of information, the world spewing more bits and bytes and articles every second.. who exactly, is listening when you publish something?
The worrisome part (for me) is that Social Media might just not be that effective in making you a publisher. Sure some see your posts.. anytime I put a picture of my kids on FB I get tons of comments. But requests for help? Not so much. 3 in this case, and we’ll see how the tally goes as the day goes on.
Admittedly, I didn’t see it! So there’s a lot to be said for how the settings on those networks are configured.
But more importantly, we certainly are all publishers, but you’re right, most goes into the ether. Although there are ways to buy influence, at the end of the day, the only real solution to building a following on these and other networks is to slowly do it over time. See… the second time you did it, I noticed, read the whole thing and commented! It does work ….
Thanks for the vote Nick! I was going to post a link to the article on 3P: http://www.triplepundit.com/podium/mightbuyit-supporting-businesses-believe/ – It does make a difference when we publish, but for me anyway seems to be 3 out of 1800 possible responses.
Jury is still out, since I haven’t had time to ping people personally, Social Media posts may win, 3-1 right now.
I did see the post, but I haven’t acted on it yet. I probably will sometime in the next few days. Like any other sales or advertising pitch, you have to repeat the process several times to assure your entire audience has gotten the message.
One day special Chris! Voting is closed on the 11th. I think you are right, takes a few tries. I tried something today though, jumped on chat and asked my friend directly. That works very well.. but takes time and only a few are online.
Hi Charles,
Interesting experience. If there isn’t a game, funny picture or some other distraction, posts will get swallowed in the void.
Some more feedback for what it is worth – I saw your tweet and clicked through but on realising I had to register, put it in the ‘investigate basket’ (I hadn’t heard of Vator and think twice before signing up to another mailing list). This blog post that came via my RSS feed reminded me. But looks like you can’t create an account on Vator at the moment (well unless you have a Facebook account – which I have done away with). So even though I’m motivated to vote – I’ve been tracking your work for a bit and like what you are doing – that is all too hard…
Cheers
Rohan
Rohan great feedback, thanks for commenting. I wouldn’t expect twitter in particular to result in votes, so I wasn’t shocked there. The link I supplied is a direct link to vote, which requires registration without even knowing what you are voting for.
Vator’s user registration system isn’t very slick.. so I could see people not doing it. But I was a little more worried about FB, where I provided a lot of context asking for help. I found it much more effective to reach people 1-1 when I need something. Chat is by far the best, emails is about as good.
I think I could answer the article question:
- depends on who you are
- depends on what you are saying
Not quite as catchy.
Vator was definitely a big barrier in this instance. First had to remember my Vator name & password. Took me three tries.l Next, had to scan the Vator page a few times to see the small hyperlink saying vote – it wasn’t obvious at all – no button or other graphic. Points out how social media, while giving us all a microphone, has made our attention & action such valuable resources that anything in the process that requires reading, remembering login, searching or other time increases likelihood of aborting. I was highly motivated to vote for you (and did), but I almost aborted when confronting the obstacles above. Even though it only took me probably three minutes start to finish, that seems like an eternity now when I have so many feeds and streams I’m attending to.
Thanks David, agree with this. Tweeting it now “Points out how social media, while giving us all a microphone, has made our attention & action such valuable resources that anything in the process that requires reading, remembering login, searching or other time increases likelihood of aborting”.
I thought the voting process was actually difficult to figure out, and I consider myself pretty tech savvy. I think that’s probably the biggest hurdle. Good luck with it all
So some updates on this. 1st, Mightbuy (Prizzm, Inc) made it to the 3rd round of Vator! http://vator.tv/competition/vator-splash-sf-september-2012. Thanks to everybody who voted.
In terms of actually getting votes, reaching out to people directly was by far the most effective method. The original post on FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn generated 3 votes that I know of. Email wasn’t much better. There were 20+ generated by contacting friends directly.
A number of takeaways, including Davids comments above:
a. I you are asking somebody to do something on Social Media, it better be EASY. Attention is a scare resource
b. You need to market and sell repeatedly to get noticed. Things get lost in the stream and don’t come back. I had the option of reposting the request. I opted not to as I was running this experiment.
c. The signup process for Vator is bad. No other way to say that guys.. came up every time as you can see in these comments and personal feedback. I guess that is related to #1 – design and usability is at the forefront of startups today because if something doesn’t work well, it isn’t used at all.
And your customers will be talking about your product. #reversecrm.