Less is more when it comes to social media
“The surest way to make social networking pay is to build deeper relationships with fewer people.”
This from a post on how to make social media pay by John Jantsch (@ducttape) on his Duct Tape Marketing blog this morning.
Despite how most attorneys and law firms look at social media, it’s not a numbers game. Success is not measured by how many followers you have or how many social media channels you can pump your content through.
Success from social media, assuming you are seeking new work, is, in most part, going to come from relationships you’ve built and nurtured through engaging others on social media. After all, it’s relationships and a word of mouth reputation that drives work to good lawyers.
Jantsch focuses on something dear to my heart when it comes to the net. Help others.
The reality is that you make social networking pay the way you’ve always made networking pay – by focusing on two things – who you can help and who can help you…….
If you are going to limit your networking to those you can help or target and network with someone that can help you, you’ve got a real capacity problem.
See, in order to do either or both, you must actually get to know something about the hopes, dreams, goals and objectives of the person you’re trying to network with and you can’t do that with a “follow” or a “like.”
Jantsch goes on to give some sound advice.
- Identify five people that you know you can help and that you would appreciate your help and reach out and offer to do something very specific to help them with your only goal being to raise them up a bit and start to build a relationship based on giving.
- Identify five people that you know can help you achieve an objective this year and reach out and offer to do something very specific to help them with your only goal being to become a resource and start to build a relationship based on giving.
No you can’t turn such work over to your marketing person. And yes, such focus can take more thought and time than merely pushing your stuff at people through social media.
But 5 or 10 new relationships which can lead to new work is a better way to measure the ROI on social media than with followers and analytics.