Followers, Fans or Emails? What do You Want?
If you are a marketer in this crazy digital era we live in you know firsthand how important it really is to be visible everywhere. You have Twitter, Facebook and that ancient form of marketing, email. All are very important so how do you prioritize which are the most important to seek during the day?
• Emails: The good thing about emails is that they are all yours. Nobody can take them away from you and you can reach out to them however you like. A nice email list is something that can be leveraged also when trying to form any partnerships. Most importantly an email list is tangible and very valuable. It takes a lot of effort to build a list of people who actually wish to hear from you on a regular basis.
• Facebook Fans: It depends on your industry but Facebook fans are always going to have some sort of importance. Facebook is not going anywhere any time soon. Facebook is most likely only getting started. As time goes on more demographics will start to make their way into the pages of Facebook and it will be important for your brand to at least be there waiting for them. It will be a place for them to get together and communicate at the very least. It is a website that will be an important force to be part of for a very long time.
• Twitter Followers: It is difficult to make an opinion on the future of Twitter but for the present time all businesses should be applying it in someway. When you have followers someone is bound to see you yelling so for the time being there is a certain level of importance to have a presence along with followers on Twitter. Be vocal, say something every day and visitors will migrate to you over time.
Rick Harris from Visibility Magazine had this to say about the issue:
“So, if one business said they had 10,000 opt-in email addresses and another said they had 10,000 followers on Twitter, then to me, and I believe the majority of the internet marketing industry, the opt-in email addresses are a whole lot more valuable to you as a business and make your business more credible.”
Each type of contact has a unique level of importance. Just remember that down the road if Twitter or Facebook shut their doors they take their fans and followers with them to the grave. All those years of hard work down the drain, whereas your email contacts will be quietly sleeping in a spreadsheet somewhere nobody can touch.
5 Responses to “Followers, Fans or Emails? What do You Want?”
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Well…ALL: followers, emails and emails! Of course, it depends on the objectives of your strategy, the type of business as well as its size. But for larger businesses all three are important!
I don’t think it’s close – the email list is much more valuable than Twitter followers. If you manage your list correctly you can get a large percentage of them to respond to your email. With Twitter you are lucky if they even see your 140 characters, especially if they follow thousands of other people.
I think Facebook fans are somewhere in the middle but still not not nearly as valuable as an email address.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for reading, yeah email lists are so very important…I look at building an email list as a tangible equity in the business…
I left Facebook because of their privacy issue, and the only emails I got were from people wanting me to follow them. As a B2C platform Facebook sucks. As for Twitter, I do enough to keep my brand visible and I attract new followers each day, but no sales have originated from it. I have done email campaigns, joined social networks, revamped my site SEVERAL times, rechecked my keywords, and done everything else to make my site visible, but I suspect that the one reason that no one wants to buy direct from me is interference of some kind from Google, which is the main hosting element I use aside from my own web provider. I have no idea how many people from Yahoo or MSN may have been locked out. When I have tried to navigate Google myself I have run into timeouts, lag time and freezeups. If you recommend another good search engine I will move to it.
Hi Theresa,
Thanks for reading and for sharing your experiences with social media, email marketing and search marketing. Other than Google, Yahoo and Bing, I do not know of any other good, powerful search engines…I think the one piece of advice that I can give you is that all aspects of internet marketing (SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email Marketing, etc.) all should work together and build over time towards the same business goals.
Anyway, thanks again for commenting and for reading!
Nick