The only way your company grows is if it makes more money. Social media has a way of convincing people they are successful when they are not. Let’s assume you achieve all your social media “Dreams.” Let’s assume you become influential, a thought leader, an expert, and let’s say that you are the top dog on one of the social media platforms. It doesn’t maintain anything if you are not making extra sales. Unless your business goal is to earn money from social media affiliate adverts, then it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, how influential you are, or how much you are respected, if you are not making extra sales and more money, then you are failing.
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Being Popular Isn’t Your Goal
As stressed in the introduction, being popular on social media doesn’t mean you make more sales. It doesn’t mean people will buy your stuff, unless it somehow directly relates to your social media content, and even then, people don’t buy from social media influencers. That is why celebrities cannot run businesses, it is why social media influencers have to prop up their makeup, clothing, gaming, etc., businesses with their own money that they earned from affiliate adverts and sponsors.
You need content that speaks directly to your consumer. In other words, you need to target your audience. Being popular means you draw in a very broad audience. If you are a small business and you want to make more money, then you need to limit your follower to people who are interested in your brand.
Why Is Being Popular So Sought After?
The first reason is because people believe that internet stars run amazing businesses and make millions, but if that were true, where are they now? Are you wearing PewDiePie sneakers? Are you wearing Kylie Jenner’s lipstick? Have you tried the Khaby Lame recipes, and how does your Ariana Grande perfume smell?
The second reason, (and this one is at least partially valid) is because getting new followers is easier if you are already popular. This is somewhat true at the time of writing, but it is not as simple as it sounds.
Unraveling the Complexity of Social Media Recommendations
Before you understand how to exploit social media for the benefit of your business, you need to understand how and why it works. We need to sink our knife into the belly of the beast and finger is warm and steamy entrails.
You need to understand that social media doesn’t want your business to be successful on its platform. They are running a business, and it doesn’t benefit them if your business gets lots of attention and sales. They want to make it as difficult as possible for you to gain followers and targeted (convertible) audiences because they want to sell you advertising. On the same note, if you are willing to pay lots of money to the social media networks, you can get lots of attention and lots of easily convertible audience members. The only downside is that you are competing with companies that have a far bigger budget than you.
On the other hand, social media networks want entertaining people to do well on social media, especially those who run affiliate advertising on their network so they can share in the profits. That is why the young girl who photographs pink bows on bunnies has 1 million Instagram followers whereas your 50 posts from a marketing agency bought you 200 followers.
You have to think of it this way. If you are popular and you gain positive attention from your social media audiences, then you will not be ignored. But, you still have an uphill battle when it comes to getting attention. Being popular on social media is desirable because it makes it easier to get new followers, but consider the fact you can buy YouTube channels and make yourself instantly popular. You can stay away from bots and buy real accounts. Instead of struggling to become popular so that you can become more popular, you can pay to be popular through social media advertising networks or through buying social media accounts. You can skip ahead a little, making yourself popular so that getting more followers is a little easier.
Paying For an Audience
If you are running a small business, then do not pay for social media promotions. You cannot afford to go up against the bigger companies, who have millions per month to spend on advertising. You will always have to overpay for the crumbs that the big companies leave behind.
Instead, as a small business, you can buy social media accounts and exploit their audiences. It is far more cost-effective to buy Instagram accounts from a marketplace like Fameswap than to pay 20x more for Instagram marketing. If you think in terms of the cost of each person being exposed to your marketing or branding, every person who sees your paid advertisement on social media will cost 20x more than every person who sees your posts via an account you purchased.
Why Don’t Bigger Companies Buy Audiences?
When you legally buy another person’s social media account, it is a hassle to do and a hassle to maintain. You have to start posting to the new social media account with hopes that your followers will stick around, and then slowly convince them to follow your primary social media accounts, to buy into your brand, and to not unfollow. The hassle involved with maintaining a new social media account is why the process is far cheaper.
Focus On Targeting
There are people out there right now who are creating highly followed, highly influential content, and they are doing it because they find it interesting. They are not running marketing departments, and most of them are surprised by the positive responses they get. These people create the sort of content that your customers would love. You shouldn’t be handing the viewing numbers over to regular social media creators when you could be doing it to a much higher degree of quality.
Most businesses can offer a certain type of content that is appealing. For example, if you run a restaurant, you can show people behind the scenes, you can show people how to cook certain items, which knives and forks to use, how to eat oysters, where your food comes from and so forth.
If you are selling boxed products, then you can create unboxing videos, you can demonstrates your products and you can review them. You can compare your products to the products of your competitors. You can also put your products under extreme pressure to see how they react (like dropping your Smartphones into the ocean to see if they survive).
If you run a service, such as a pest removal service, then you can show what goes on behind the scenes. You can explain which chemicals are the safest, and how to keep your pets safe during pest-removal processing. If you wish, you can show people some of your grimy jobs, or show people what to look for to check for themselves if they have pests.
All of these examples are just a few of the ways that people are “Already” producing content. Why are you letting that 14yr old girl get 2 million views per post when she unboxes Smartphone covers on her YouTube channel when you can be doing the same for your products? Why are you letting other people earn thousands of followers reviewing your products when you could be reviewing them yourself?
