Insight: Five principles of a great fan base

We all know the scenario:

• Contest objective that targets a gazillion unknown people.
• Competing for media coverage that appears in unknown corners in as many unknown magazines as possible.
• Two teenage girls competing with one another to see how many friends they both have.
• Database vendor bragging that they have more data than the nearest competitor.

The same with marketing. Every client marketer we know face the looming titanic metric: Numbers. Traffic. Readership. #.

If you start a social media campaign, you’ll probably be tempted to do the same as well: get as many fans, followers, retweets, blog post, etc, as possible.

That’s where you’ll stumble upon the trap of herding quantity with no regard to quality. Sure, a large fan base looks impressive on the outside, but at what cost? It’s a complete effort waster that will ultimately eat into your resources.

How do you stay on the path and avoid a herding mentality? The truth is, doing it right isn’t easy and there isn’t a magic formula or thing that can automate this for you. Over the years, our agency has built upon 5 principles that guide us in our quest to build quality fans.

Principle #1: Make a decision from the start: Quality or Quantity?

Giving quality the lip service is always easy. But when faced with calls for your head at board meetings or post-mortem evaluations, will you still stand firm to your value of quality or quantity? Everyone faces the pressure from higher-ups for quantity. More visitors, more eyeballs, more fans, more followers – generally in the belief that “more” will translate to more sales, more returns, more ROI.

But having “more” isn’t good enough for more ROI. Quality is what generates real ROI. The real focus should be on those who matter: real fans who are real buyers, a great story in a quality publication, and a group of highly potential clients following you on Twitter.

After all, it’s pointless to have thousands of people following you on Twitter or your Facebook page simply to hawk their “insert the latest affiliate/money-making scheme here” idea. In fact, sites like Facebook and Twitter are filled with such individuals that avoiding them will be a huge challenge.

Don’t scramble at the last minute to justify even the best decisions made. Make a decision early on. Write it down. Pin it up on your wall. Have torturously long meetings with your stakeholders and repeat throughout. When crunch time comes, you’ll be able to defend your position that quality matters.

Principle #2: Know when to BUY, SELL or HOLD

Great sales people will tell you that timing is everything. When do you give customers room to move (HOLD)? When do you provide relevant information that assist customers in making the right decision (BUY)? Or when do you aggressively close the sale (SELL)?

Timing is crucial to your success. For example, don’t make every blog post about the latest discount offer, or a sale. There’s definitely room to educate about product features, or even to solicit feedback and conversation.

These same principles apply whether you’re pitching for a sale, or pitching for a story to an Editor, or updating your status on Facebook or Twitter. Don’t simply stalk an editor simply to get your story across, but be a great source of material, even if it doesn’t benefit you one bit.

The right timing will result in building the one most important commodity in business: TRUST.

Principle #3: Invest in Quality

It is in our nature to go with the largest. The largest audience, the largest readership, the largest circulation. Do remember that hidden inside the mass are nuggets of gold. Invest in them. Invest in quality publications that reach quality audiences. Cultivate great bloggers who have great, but not necessarily the most fans. Seek out customers who may not be the year’s most famous socialite but hold their own nevertheless. When you do that right, you earn quality relationships.

Principle #4: Be patient

If you take the time to cultivate solid relationships with your best customers, and repeat the process over and over with your next best customer, sooner or later, you’ll have a lot of good customers.

We learn a huge lesson with several social media campaigns we ran on Facebook, that if you’re not prudent, you’ll end up with a list of fans who’re there simply to hawk their own websites, products or latest schemes. Taking the time to build quality fans and resisting the urge to mass invite and canvas for clicks resulted in a growing fanbase that loves the brand.

Principle #5: Know when to move on

Finally, even the best list requires pruning. Our agency for example, from time to time take stock of our relationships, from our Twitter followers, media lists, suppliers to even our customers and decide if they are worth keeping in the list. Pruning overgrown leaves is essential in keeping a beautiful tree healthy. It gives you amble opportunity to place proper focus on the right people.

Building quality customers requires time. Don’t succumb to the quick-fix of harvesting as many people as you can just to meet some magical number but rather take the time and effort to prune your own tree into something extraordinary. The result is worthwhile.

Do you have a principle that you use to build quality fans? Share it with us, we love to hear from you.