Creating Value for Social Followings

Realization, Understanding

Putting together a strategy for social networks can be a time consuming prospect. All to many times I have seen random blogs, posts, and social accounts with no following, hits and presence. In my book, a complete waste of space and resources. The internet is inundated with useless content that provides no value, purpose or meaning and distracts viewers from finding the information that they need from a trusted source. So, today I am going to talk about creating a Value Proposition when it relates to Social Networks by establishing a Baseline Purpose with a targeted path to your overall ending destination or reason for publishing.

One of the first things I recommend to all my clients before embarking on their social journey is to grab a sheet of paper and right out the following guidelines:

• What is my purpose or reason for setting up a social network?
• What do I have to offer the social network once its setup?
• Do I have the time to commit to the social network
• Now that I have established my purpose, what do I want to accomplish, what will be the ending destination?
• Once my plan is in place, I have taken the time to set up my social networks and I have allotted the time to commit to them, how will I make my social following grow?

These are the question that need to be answered before you put the time and effort it takes to build your online following and community. Some of you are thinking that you just want the social networks to stay connected to family and friends. If that is the case that is ok, thus the aforementioned process is not for you. However, even in the case of Family and Friends, taking this modeled approach in time can make you the most popular friend one could have. Lets begin...

I have a Twitter account that I setup a few months ago. It can be found here http://twitter.com/RodneyLiber and the significance of my twitter account (as you will see if you read all my posts) is that I learned something very valuable over the last few months of posting. No one cares that I took my dog to the vet, that I just washed my truck, or that I am thinking about eating Pizza for dinner. However, if you review twitter posts like I have you will find a common theme. Millions of people have thousands of followers and no one really reads the other persons posts. Why? Because they have no value at all. For most, its about how many people you can get to follow you. Which at the end of the day is worthless. For those few months I had no new followers. After thinking about this and looking at social networks as a whole, the commonality between what I was doing and many others is that their was no purpose for most posts all across the board. They were useless. How do we fix this? Oh, and during the creation of the last few paragraphs I have had 7 more people on twitter sign up to follow me.

Creating Your Value Proposition

One of the first steps of creating a successful social network is defining your purpose for it. Once you have defined your purpose then you must create value. Here is what Wikipedia states a Value Proposition is:

In the field of marketing, a customer value proposition consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises that a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment (or other value-transfer).

Put simply, the value proposition is what the customer gets for his money.

Accordingly, a customer can evaluate a company's value-proposition on two broad dimensions with multiple subsets:

1. relative performance: what the customer gets from the vendor relative to a competitor's offering;
2. price: which consists of the payment the customer makes to acquire the product or service; plus the access cost

The vendor-company's marketing and sales efforts offer a customer value proposition; the vendor-company's delivery and customer-service processes then fulfill that value-proposition.

So how do we apply this to Social Marketing? In the example of my Twitter account, what turned the tides for me, or what started getting followers is when I defined my use for the Social Networks and started providing Value to the followers. Once I implemented that strategy the followers came. Its all about targeting a niche. As I began to create my niche, I then began the task of providing Value in my posts.

Someone on my LinkedIn Account asked "Does anyone have any good tips for Twitter?" Here was my response:

"Twitter is not about how many followers you get. Its about the value they get from following you. Having thousands of followers is great but the question to ask is are they quality followers. Often times as with any social network the point of twitter (who really doesn't have any type of business model) is to gain followers in a like field. Bringing value to 100 followers is better then posting something to 7000 that could care less. A good rule of thumb is to post things that will benefit those that choose to follow. Building in a value proposition with offers of freebies or rich content is the main focus of a successful leader for the following band wagon of people."

I firmly believe each twitter post needs to bring some type of value or desire for your followers to want to read and or click your posted links every time. This ensures a loyal following as well as the ability to build your trust and reputation.

In Summary:

Once you have established what your Value Proposition is (and you may already have one) you can start implementing strategies and tactics on your social networks to begin providing your "Target Audience" Valuable Information, Freebies, Giveaways, Contests etc to build your following, trust and reputation. This maximizes your potential for future sales and growth and this type methodology can be practiced across all the social networks you participate in.

About the Author:

Rodney Liber is an expert in Search Engine Optimization Techniques and Strategies. Learning how to write quality articles can be tough. Following Rodney's methods insures quality content every time. In this lesson you learned how to create Value for Social Followings.

(c) Copyright - Rodney Liber. All rights reserved World Wide.

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