If your reading this blog it's Friday 23rd December and most of the western world is settling into the festive celebrations so from my family to yours we wish you a wonderful festive break.

For now I thought the below might help stimulate some thinking around how to best leverage social networks from a business perspective.

I never understand why it is we arrive at the place of work and forget that everything, and I mean everything we do is underpinned by our ability to be social - even introverts will align themselves to people with shared views and values.

Whether we're aware of it or not throughout our lives we all join or start a community of like minded people, its what makes us the social animals we are.

It's impossible for us to manage thousands of relationships at a personal level, yet on social media platforms it seems it's the KPI to brag about.

Network connections are NOT communities - in my opinion it's a very silly and ego driven metric.

Why do I say this?

Put simply because Pareto is always in play e.g. the 80/20 rule;

The 80-20 rule is a principle that states 80% of all outcomes are derived from 20% of causes. It's used to determine the factors (typically, in a business situation) that are most responsible for success and then focus on them to improve results. The rule can be applied to circumstances beyond the realm of business, too.

One of the key things LinkedIn users fail to do is understand who is their real community and where they can add value. 

What do I mean by communities?

Example: At school we mix with the people who are funny, entertaining, share similar interest, and personally speaking, better at stuff than us, but above all its the personalities of those people during this stage that we subconsciously involve ourselves with.

The same criteria applies as we move on to senior school, sure we change our tribe but our core interest tend to remain the same. We are after all on a journey of discovering just who we are. 

The same thing happens as we move into the workplace, and start to have a family - our circle of community is ever in a state of flux.

With the rise of digital social platforms what we see today are people getting high on 'how many connections' they have. 

Connections ARE NOT communities.

Generations of people today are addicted by algorithms on ‘social media’.The immediate endorphin hit of ‘likes, shares, and comments’ fuels the addiction.

In the early days of TiKTok you could generate huge numbers of likes and followers in a matter of hours - and just like Facebook and Twitter before it a generation was hooked. 

Social is just that, it's about being social, and not everyone is going to 'get you'.

When you think about joining in communities, engaging with those communities, or creating your own instead of interrupting me with your intrusive ads, guess what?

Like minded people will be drawn to you, you will learn more about yourself, hopefully grow, and build out a loyal tribe of supportive advocates.

Using web analytics, you can start to ask some key questions in order to better understand how to give and gain value out of your community:

  • Which sources comprise the top 20% of traffic to my blog/post?
  • Who are the top 20% of my audience that I wish to reach?
  • What are the characteristics of this audience as a group?
  • Can I afford to invest more money and effort into satisfying my top 20% readers?
  • In terms of content, which blog/posts constitute the top 20% of my best-performing topics?
  • Can I improve upon those topics, and get even more traction from my content than I'm getting now?

Building a community of value takes time, consistency, focus, and patience, and yes for some they require training and support..

Building a list of 'relevant' business connections and engaging with them is part of that process - and it takes time.

There is NO SILVER BULLET…

Ask yourself “are they posting content that adds value and stimulates conversations that I can relate to or join in with” to that group? 

Social, is well - about being social, especially in a business environment isn’t it?