Follower Count Does Not Equal Expertise

I was reading an essay, Success & Perception, which has an interesting perspective on, “success and how it can distort the way we see things.” Social media was used as an example where accounts with a myriad of followers get immediate audience credibility and attention from social media algorithms. That is where the author left it. But in completing the article, I believe many of the concepts in the essay are directly applicable to social media.

The myriad of followers is indicative of the Matthew Effect of Accumulated Advantage. The Bible being the origin, Matthew 25:29:

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

The followers result from being consistent in communicating via social channels. The result being a potentially inflated self-image of expertise based on follower counts. (Dunning-Kruger Effect).

Past Glories – Lagging Statistics

Relying on summary statistics from the social media channels, it is easy to fall into the trap of just celebrating the success of a single post. This fails to consider the effort to position a following and does potentially ignore understanding posts that are not as successful.  Without this analysis, it is possible to miss an opportunity to discover, “what we don’t know.”  Not to mention, how much of a social media success can be attributed to just being persistent and random chance? Surviving.

Being inhibited, because the role of chance is difficult to quantify, is not an option. Best practices indicate to build and maintain a following requires frequent and consistent posting. This aligns with the Matthew Effect. The 80/20 rule is recommended. With 80% of posts, focusing on authority, relevancy and information which considers the emotive impact of specific words when creating content. The impact of specific words for the audience you are attempting to influence. This develops audience intimacy/trust and gains acceptance of the remaining 20% of the posts being used for promotion.

The impact of a single post or campaign cannot be assessed on its own. Previous posts and campaigns contribute to success.  Differentiation in some significant way can distinguish campaigns/post from the rest of social media traffic, developing audience intimacy.  What is required is a conscious effort defining content and desired sentiment. 

Words Make A Difference

How much success (contacts to customer) can be attributed to skill, chance and or environment elements beyond our control, is not possible. Thoughtful application of sentiment analysis in creating content, supports influencing, perhaps driving, a share of the outcome. 

Sentiment analysis, a branch or artificial intelligence, supports the thoughtful creation of social media content. Supervised or unsupervised learning techniques can be applied for developing lexicons defining the sentiment ( -4 very negative to +4 very positive) for each word in the lexicon, tuned to a specific audience. The word sentiment accompanied by a rules-base that considers syntax, context and other language nuances identifies the overall sentiment for a piece of text. The goal is to maximize the sentiment appropriate for your audience. These are the key findings on the power of sentiment content:

• Increase the quantity of social media traffic and its speed through the social media channels
• Used in addition to environment factors improves the predictability of social media diffusions
• Increased positive content increases social media acceptance and diffusion

Sentiment analysis is a technique which supports defining messaging content creation and linking to social media impressions and reach.

Social Media Explosion

Social media network growth is explosive. How explosive?

• Social media use for the 16-84 age group increased by 64%
• 10.5% annual growth across all use groups = 376 million

Across the age groups what are they using social media networks for?

• Discover brands/products via ads – 27%
• Discover brands/products via recommendations -24%
• Research products online – 43%

In addition to audience growth, information additions to the internet are projected to grow from 4.4 billion GB per day in 2016 to 463 billion GB per day in 2025 (IDC estimate). With increasing audience and use and content projected to grow 100-fold per day, how do you differentiate your brand, image, and messaging to gain, maintain and grow followers, engagement, and sales?

Are You Feeling Lucky?

What are you doing to “call your own shots” to influence each target audience or are you just hoping that you will get lucky?