What Old School Marketing Can Teach You about Social Media

I was catching up on some reading over the weekend, and in one of the books (not a marketing or business book, I might add), the persistence effect was mentioned.  It’s called other names in other places, but what it means essentially is:

Keep showing up.  There is a parallel relationship between the size of your network and the size of your profits.  Keep showing up and you’ll see that prospects will find you (although not always in the ways you imagined).

Sales and Marketing classes are full of stories from businesses who finally closed a deal on the 19th or 20th attempt or their 15th time to a networking session.  But what does all of this old school marketing stuff have to do with social media?

Keep Showing Up.

You open a Twitter account, poke around for the first couple of days.  Nobody follows you, and to be honest, you “don’t really get it.”  Seems like a waste of time, so you leave it behind.

That’s not really long enough to tell whether or not it’s the right place for you to be.  You’ve got to give it time to get a feel for the place, meet a few people, and decide whether or not you’ll get out of it what you will put in.  Unfortunately, the only way to know is to try it, but just showing up once and calling it a loss isn’t a very good way to run a business, in any situtation.

The Size of Your Network = The Size of Your Profits. Kind of.

It is true, in any industry:  business owners who have bigger networks have bigger, healthier businesses.  Savvy entrepreneurs know that the heart of this equation, though, is contacts who are valuable, interested, and engaged.  It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t maintain your network and keep up with what everyone’d doing (and do your part to help).

The same principles are at work in social media – but the need to have a bigger network just for the sake of it, I think, is exacerbated by the fact that all of our social media profiles list numbers which people equate with popularity.  If you’ve read our free do-it-yourself guide Why Twitter is a Personality Contest then you’ll know that you shouldn’t at all be interested in numbers, just raving fans.  100 raving fans is better than 10,000 uninterested network contacts.  Always.

How do you continue to grow a network that’s full of raving fans?  Keep showing up.

Success Comes in Unexpected Forms

In the world of networking and marketing, you never know what a meeting might bring.  It rarely is the case that you go to a networking event and meet your perfect business partner.  It’s more like you meet someone who is lovely but otherwise not helpful in a business sense, they meet someone else and mention you (because of your remarkable products and services, right?), and then they tell someone else who comes running in your direction because you’re perfect.

That chain of events is easier on social media, in some ways, because of the social and geographic reach of online networks.  But it’s also inherited a new problem, noise, which gets in the way of the more valuable messages.

Good businesses just keep experimenting, trying, and getting the word out.  Because they know that it isn’t just a Twitter follower or a Facebook fan that will change their fortunes.  It’s a whole bigger-picture thing that’s going on.  And the only way to be a part of the bigger picture is….to keep showing up.

Adjust When You Need To

“Keep showing up” doesn’t mean keep banging your head into a wall until it breaks (your wall or your head).  You need to be monitoring and must make a judgement call after awhile if you’re not seeing any results.  Is there another way to approach the situation?  Has there been any feedback that might give you some clues?

The digital world makes it super easy to change course along the way.  The problem?  It’s almost too easy to change course, and you’ll be tempted to flip and flop endlessly, which means you can’t track when you’ve actually got it wrong or if you just didn’t give it enough time to take shape.

Learning to know when to press on and when to stop is tough but comes with practice.  And guess how you get practice?

Keep showing up.

To Learn More

Need some help discerning if you need to change course or just keep showing up?  Why not take our free small business assessment?  It’s no stress, no fluff, and no obligation – just our view on how you’re doing on your online small business journey.