Facebook page - 80,000 likes
Twitter - 50,000 followers
To date, Social Media has earned me a big fat zero.
Out of curiosity, how many of those Twitter Followers and FB likes are automated bot jobbies?
There are plenty of people out there with 60K, 80K and 100K likes and followers but a good portion of these are from bot accounts and from people using Like, Share and Retweet websites where people exchange likes, shares and retweets just to boost their follower numbers to look more popular than they actually are.
The amount of traffic and interraction from these bot accounts is virtually nil in my experience. They are just bot / spam accounts full of bot followers only interested in promting themselves, their ideas or their business. They do not promote you or your ideas or your business and so they generate next to nothing in visitor traffic, interraction or conversions.
To make use of social media, you need to target genuine people with more genuine people following them. Sadly, twitter etc. seems to be a mass of bots following bots and autotweeters these days.
Look around here for yourself and see how many people are setting up 1,000s of Twitter accounts with the sole purpose of spamming and selling. There's no human activity there at all.
Following these guys and their kind of accounts is of no benefit as a marketer / promoter. Once you follow one, then twitter and facebook recommends other accounts associated with these accounts and you end up with hundreds, if not thousands of useless bot twitter accounts following you and all your promotion is going nowhere.
Trust me, I speak from learned experience. I've tried these Like for Like, Tweet for Tweet type sites and all you end up with is accounts full of strange arabic names spamming the hell out of twitter. Then as soon as they've gotten their like or share or tweet, they remove any likes, follows, retweets etc. they were required to give you to earn their credits to get their own likes and shares themselves. Gradually the likes and followers you've earned dwindle away to nothing and you're left with hundreds if not thousands of spammy people you've had to follow and they've taken all their likes, shares, follows back.
Unless your followers / audience are genuine, expect nothing.
Because I have the time, I now hand pick who I follow and make sure they're human AND of my target sex, age range etc.
These botters may have thousands of accounts and thousands of followers but they lack what I'm after - human beings and quality traffic / interraction. To encourage these human vistors and to keep them coming and coming back, you need to make sure your content (as has been said) is engaging your audience. Make use of stats and analytics to see what your visitors are doing, where they're going, how long they're staying, what they're doing etc. Then you can tweak your site / marketing to suit. Stats are vital in this game. Building a site and not knowing what's happening on/with it is like trying to build a house in the complete dark!
Not that I'm an expert you understand. I'm still learning but it seems logical that you would want more humans following you than bots only interested in their own ends.
One tip I would give to ANYONE is if they have a search box on their website is make good use of it. Log what people are searching for, when etc and pay close attention to the things they can't find and then make sure you get whatever it is they were looking for incase they come back or for anyone else that might be looking for it - especially if you've had a few searches for this "thing" you don't have. Sometimes, the best information comes from people looking for what you don't have. Then when you get it, make sure you share it everywhere and the internet will take care of the rest - more so if this "thing" is in demand.
