I see a lot of people building their following on Instagram and other social media platforms. Just like the dog chasing a car, what do you do when you catch it?
Running an online business with the “best” (however that word is defined) product or service means nothing when it comes to sales. It is the relationship you have with your target audience that allows you to make sales on demand. Many Influencers have over 100k followers, some even millions. But just because you have a certain number of people following you, or the influencer you want to connect with, is in no way a guarantee that you will be able to sell products and services to those followers, or even reach them with your message. .
Instagram and other online social media platforms are constantly changing their algorithms, not for your benefit but for theirs. Right now, a post made by an account on Instagram reaches only around 8% of their followers: 8,000 people for every 100,000 followers. And when I say that a post “reaches” 8% of an audience, that in no way guarantees that they will read it or take any other action based on that post. At best, you can expect around 30 percent of those 8,000 followers to respond. That means out of 100,000 followers, only 2,400 engage with you based on that post.
Building and having a relationship with people online, and then monetizing that relationship, requires three steps:
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have access to those people
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Owning the product or service you offer to those people.
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Owning the sales process (or store) that offers your product or service to your target audience
If someone else controls even one of those steps in this process, you can’t own the relationship with the people in your target audience. It can be removed at any time, either temporarily or permanently.
If you have followers or fans on a social media platform, they can go away at any time, as can any influence you have with these people. You need to start taking them out of the media algorithm and putting them on your own list. A “list” is simply a list of contacts, where you have a person’s permission to communicate with them at the point of contact they have provided. For the past few years, I have focused on building email lists with my clients.
Based on factors like message frequency and level of interest, email lists have an overall open rate of about 16%. Right off the bat, this is double the engagement rate of a social media post. Out of 100,000 people, you will get about 16,000 people to see your message. Using the same 30% action rate example, this means that 4,800 people will take some type of action based on receiving your message. That’s twice the number of people from a single social media post.
Recently, I have been working with clients to collect mobile phone numbers and encouraging them to communicate with their list via SMS. Why? Because studies show that more than 90 percent of people who receive an SMS message read it within 10 minutes of receiving it. Let’s say your list is only 25,000 people, a quarter of the number of followers we’ve been talking about. That means approximately 22,500 people will read your message within 10 minutes of sending it. Again, using a 30% action rate, approximately 6,750 people will take action based on that SMS message. That’s a forty percent increase in engagement when sending an email! If you’re selling at a price of one hundred dollars, that could mean an increase of over $195,000 with a switch to a different messaging medium. That, of course, is based on the assumption that you own the relationship with your customers and prospects.
In the last few months alone, Instagram has made it possible to automate direct messaging. Within that automation, you may collect personal information, including contact information such as email address and mobile phone number. That makes it possible to automate list building from a direct message stream without your prospect ever leaving the Instagram app.
But list building is only the first step on the road to monetization. I’ll explore ownership of your offer and sales process in future articles. I encourage you to reach out if you want to know more.
