I start many of my presentations by asking the audience for their reaction to this statement: “Social media is more biological than mathematical.” After a short while, they begin to make the connection. “When you’re posting and interacting on social media, you are interacting with people,” they respond.
You may have read a dozen “how to” articles about cracking the algorithms — which sound very mathematical — of any social media platform, but at the end of the day, you’re communicating with people. And as people, social media users are prone to one very natural, very biological tendency: They forget things. They forget people.
Memories have a biological half-life. If someone sees you or sees something you post, there might be a 50% chance that they’ll think about you during the next week. The second week? Maybe a 25% chance. Unless you give your connections a new reason to think about you, the likelihood of them thinking doing so drops dramatically from the point when you last communicated with them.
At any given moment, you can be sure of one thing: Either your prospective clients are thinking about you or they’re not thinking about you.
Well, duh. But consider the importance of this fact for a moment. If they’re not thinking about you, there’s a 0% chance that they’re going to call you when they face a problem.
Social media is a great way to make your clients think about you.
Before social media, this was a lot harder. Long before social media took off, I worked in sales for a major recordkeeper. I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, but my first sales territory was Indiana. Eventually I graduated to Chicago, and finally I got home to Wisconsin. I kept the same phone number with each jump. I had made a habit of calling the advisors with whom I was working on a regular basis, and through my time in each territory I developed many working relationships.
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But each time I moved on to the next territory, I rarely, if ever, heard from those connections again. My contact info was the same, but since I wasn’t calling them, they forgot about me. Since we didn’t have social media, the only way for me to contact them would be to use work time that was reserved for my current territory, or to use my personal time that was reserved for my family and personal friends. Had social media existed back then, it would have been a lot easier to maintain those business relationships.
Additionally, social media offers you the chance to become “famous.” All you have to do is be consistent.
Here’s what I mean: When I was a kid, if you had asked me to name five famous people, I would have listed a couple of actors, a few major league baseball players, and the President of the United States. And a lot of people my age would have named the same celebrities. At the time, the number of people who could become famous was finite. Either you were in the movies, a professional athlete, or a politician.
But now we have massive numbers of micro-celebrities. Ask 100 12-year-olds who their favorite YouTuber is, and you’ll get around 100 answers. Members of niche audiences can easily find each other, and from each niche a leader emerges.
Due to the sheer scope of social media, you don’t have to become famous in the traditional sense — CEO of a Fortune 500 company, NBA player, movie star — before you start having an impact on people that you’ve never met. Social media gives you a path to earn fame by producing great content, consistently.
Everyone thinks, “Why me? Why would anyone care about what I have to say?” My answer: “Why not you?”
Have you heard of the 1% Rule of the Internet? It’s a phenomenon that applies across any kind of digital network. Internet users are divided into these three categories (you’re going to recognize yourself in one of them):
- 90% of users are only observers and consumers. You’ll hear the kids these days call them “lurkers” or “creepers.” They read, watch, listen, laugh, cry, or rage, but they don’t engage.
- 9% of users engage. They like, comment, and share. They show other people they’re listening while also furthering the conversation.
- 1% of users — only a fraction of people online — create.
Which category do you fall into?
Now let’s talk about the 9% who create and the 1% who engage.
If you publish content on the internet, and you track the engagement metrics because you’re obsessed with knowing the Return of Investment (ROI) of your effort, you can only ever track 10% of your potential impact!
Keep the 1% Rule of the Internet in mind. If you know there are people out there watching, even though they’re not engaging, it’s incumbent on you to keep serving them, knowing that they are, in fact, paying attention.
The first excuse I hear as to why someone is not on social media is that no one is listening. “What’s the point?” they ask. “What’s the ROI?”
But think about your own behavior. How many posts, conversations, videos and tweets do you read without engaging at all?
People are listening, and simply by creating content, you have the opportunity to distinguish yourself as part of the 1%.
The key to hacking the biological platform of social media is consistency. It’s better to provide snippets of value every few days than to let months pass between posts. This goes back to that biological half-life.
Think about binge watching a show on Netflix. When Netflix releases a whole season of Orange is the New Black at once, everyone talks about it for a week. They’re obsessed with the complex story lines and characters. But three months later, while waiting for the next season to be produced, nobody is thinking about Piper.
All it takes for you to stay at the top of your connections’ mind on social media is to post valuable content consistently. There’s no mathematical formula. It’s just human nature.
Spencer X Smith is the founder of spencerXsmith.com. He’s a former 401(k) wholesaler, and now teaches financial services professionals how to use social media for business development. This column originally appeared in the Winter issue of NAPA Net the Magazine.
