I just passed 3700 followers on Twitter, well on my way to the goal of 20000 followers. With this pace, though, it will still take me three years to get there.
But even though I have such a large Twitter following, I get on average less than one reader per blog post. Even though I post links to the blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
Google Plus is interesting. I just got my first follower there. And every time I post I get some search hits. They quickly disappear, so I assume this has to do with how Google Plus posts are indexed.
The weird thing is people write and thank me for my Twitter feed. I seem to be much better at that than blog posts. Maybe I should try to write tweet-short blog posts. Actually, why not? I would stand out at least.
It may be OK that nobody cares to read my blog posts, but there is one problem. If people do not read my blog, how do I get them to sign up for the email list? All the marketing gurus who so freely offer their opinions on the Internet agree: you have to get people to sign up to your email list, otherwise it is much harder to turn them to repeat customers. And that is what you want as a business owner. The only thing that is better than repeat customers are subscribers, who pay in advance instead of buying your product when it is done.
Up to now, my plan has been to set up an email list and offer content on that as well, so I can get peoples email addresses. Because the marketers do have a point. When you sell something through iTunes and Amazon (and probably Google Play and the windows store, but I have not investigated that yet), you have no idea who bought your product. You only know that it is someone in a certain country, since Amazon reports sales based on which Amazon store the sale went through.
If you want to reach out to your customer, engage in a dialogue and communicate with them (for instance, offer additional products), you need a way to reach them. Unless you get their email address, (or some equivalent form of communication), you do not have that.
If you ask for peoples email addresses on Twitter and Facebook (and possibly Google Plus as well), your readers take a very dim view of this. And if you do it too often, so do the service providers.
I have some ideas for how to get around this, because the model of steering users from social media to your blog to the email list to sales is clearly broken. Either the idea that users should sign up to your email list is broken, or the idea that you should get them to sign up through the blog.
I will revise my websites when I get a chance to sit down and do this, but it is not easy if you have a demanding job and small children who demand all your constant attention, and then some. I actually do most of my writing on the commuter train. And then, the iPhone is your best friend, the only tool that works when you are holding it in one hand and hold on to the strap for your dear life with the other.
Yes, you can do it on the iPhone, but it has its quirks. The keyboard is kind of hard to use, and it forces you to write a lot slower. You do make many more mistakes than if you type on a computer. And it is nowhere near as good for managing social media as a PC. If someone wanted to make a killing in the social media market, they would make a tool for managing blogs, social media, and email lists that integrated all of them on a social and mobile platform. But we are not there yet.
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