Influence in social media is not a numbers game
Suzanne Vara penned a wonderful post this morning at Social Media Today entitled ‘Influence is not a Mathematics Game.’
Lawyers and legal marketing professionals chasing numbers and statistics as a measure of their social media success ought to heed Vara’s message.
- Influence is from the relationships that we build within our community. What do the people that know you or are exposed to you on the social media profiles say about you? What stands out about you that makes them even think about you, visit your blog, tweet you on Twitter? What makes people literally stop what they are doing to make YOU their focus?
- Influence is not a mathematics game, it’s about people. Don’t care about the numbers of followers, friends, connections, retweets. Care about the people. There is always a person behind each tweet, like, friend, blog, etc. that is not a number.
- You build influence by communicating. Be yourself. Give it all you have. You’ll influence others with your passion and excitement.
- Build influence by being a member of a community. Give of yourself. Share something that you think no-one is paying attention to, reaching out to people more than you check the traffic stats, retweets, etc.
Influence, not a measure of one’s capacity to bully others, but a measure of being respected as an authority has always been a measure of success for lawyers. It’s been the case long long before we ever had the Internet, let alone social media.
Unfortunately, the Internet whether it be websites, email marketing campaigns, blogs, or social media brought with it the ability to measure something in numbers. How many visitors? How many followers? How many times has my blog post or Tweet been shared?
Why not measure influence in social media the same way we’ve always measured influence in the legal profession? By earning the respect of others through caring about other people and giving of ourselves.
Being of influence and having a good reputation as a lawyer is more than a numbers game.