Conventional wisdom states that there are two types of followers in social media. There are those who share your content, 'like', retweet or comment on your posts, and interact or converse with you...and those who don't. Or, in social media speak, those that are engaged and those that aren't. But let me introduce to you a different scenario, one that's relevant whether or not any given follower is engaged or not. Have you ever stopped to consider the 'value' of a follower or group of followers, irrespective of whether they interact with you or not?
Let's take the example of a designer jewellery brand with a Facebook page that has 500 fans (I still don't know what to call fans now that we 'like' not 'become a fan'!). The brand has three key baseline objectives for its Facebook page: first, it wants to increase the number of fans, and second, it wants to increase the number of those fans who are engaged with the page (and therefore, the brand). Its third objective is to attract only people who it sees as core target market, in this case businesspeople with a given level of disposable income. The argument goes that it is only these people who are likely to convert to paying customers for a designer jewellery brand. Those in its core target market are more relevant and more valuable than those who aren't. Makes sense, right?
Or does it? As I have said before, the social web is all about sharing. The power of social media is in its ability to spread word of mouth messages between friends and colleagues. Social media doesn't discriminate on the grounds of financial wealth or job title or, for that matter, location, gender, race or age. Using myself as an example, I have friends and contacts across the social web from all walks of life. Some are wealthy, some are not; some would shop at the example designer jewellery brand, some would not. If I personally fell into the 'not relevant' category and was therefore not desired as a Facebook fan of the brand, that brand would miss out on my potential to share its messages with my wealthy friends and colleagues and, therefore, my advocacy. The point is that I personally might never purchase from said brand...but that some of my friends just might.
So the question is: is it blinkered to want to attract only those who are in your brand's core target market via social media channels? In an ideal world, all of our social media followers would be both highly relevant and highly engaged. But the social web (and human nature, for that matter) simply doesn't work like that. Any social presence will have a varied mix of engaged and non-engaged followers, and relevant and non-relevant followers. This dynamic is plotted in the diagram below. I'd argue that it's easier to convert a highly engaged but less relevant follower (an advocate) into a brand ambassador than a very relevant but un-engaged follower (a potential consumer).
So where does this leave page administrators when it comes to posting content? Do we stick to strong on-brand, product-related messaging focused solely on key demographics in the hope of appealing to 'relevant' people, whether they're engaged or not? Or do we lighten up a little, recognise that there are people who are less relevant but far more likely to share our messages and that these people may well know others who are relevant? Do we therefore adjust our content accordingly by being more 'social': posting music videos and other multimedia content (for example) that while maybe is not on-brand, is more engaging? Do we need to be less hung-up about our brand and to ditch the brand guidelines when it comes to social media marketing?
Over to you: if they're engaged, to what extent does it matter who your social media followers are?