The Power of Social Media

Have you ever watched a strong man competition?

It often looks like a bunch of guys who have overdone it at the buffet, but it takes a certain type of athlete to participate in this type of event. I have nothing but admiration for them.

I know first hand what it’s like to carry something too heavy up stairs. It hurts like hell! The build up of lactic acid is immense. For these guys you can’t even begin to imagine the pain they endure.

Whenever I watch the show, the feat of strength that always amazes me is when they strap on a harness and pull a bus, or a train or a plane. It just shouldn’t be possible….. but it is.

This picture is Mark Kirsch setting a world record pulling a 205,000 pound plane 100 feet in 34 seconds. Quite astonishing.

Now, you are probably asking yourself where I am going with this and what it’s got to do with social media, blogging, tweeting on Twitter, Facebook etc?

Getting anywhere in Social Media, blogging, using Twitter etc. is very much like pulling a plane or a train or an automobile in a strong man competition and here is why :

It takes a herculean effort to get the thing moving. In strong man terms they put all their effort in, veins bulge out of their head and nothing happens. In social media terms you set up your Twitter account/Facebook account/your blog and nobody reads it other than you and your very close circle of friends colleagues.
You get the first roll of the wheels. In strong man terms this is the point that all the effort on the start line begins to yield results. In social media terms this might be your first 10 followers on Twitter, your first feedburner subscriber, 5 more friends on Facebook.
It starts to gather momentum. In strong man terms your legs still keep pumping but the initial effort is what is keeping the plane moving. In social media terms your subscriber base increases but they need you to keep blogging/tweeting otherwise the momentum will stop
It looks effortless. In strong man terms you are sprinting for the line, mainly because your legs, arms and body are burning from the effort, but it is gratifying when you get to the line. In social media terms you get a bunch of subscribers, and more follow you or subscribe mostly on the back of either one blog post or word of mouth.

A good example of this is the band Coldplay, you might have heard of them, and if you do then you can follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/coldplay

If you look at their Twitter account they set it up 3 days ago.

They got 36 followers in the first 3 days.

Then they sent out a message and mentioned their new Twitter account had been set up and followers went from 36 to 1800 in next to no time and then on to 3900 inside 16 hours.

I’ll make a prediction now that inside a few months Coldplay’s Twitter account will be almost as popular as Barack Obama is on Twitter and certainly as popular as their Facebook account (where the fan page has over 1.3 million fans, and is the most popular music page on Facebook)

This will be the case particularly if they use one to talk about the other, and that to me is the gold dust of this type of Social Media, one can support the other’s growth, if they talk to each other in a sensitive way – i.e. don’t update everything on Twitter on Facebook/Plaxo/Linked In using widgets.

So, I’m really interested by way of just comments to the post to know your answers to the following questions:

How many blog subscribers does it take for the perpetuation of new subscribers to happen organically?
How many Twitter followers do you need before you get growth of decent volume without random giveaways/prizes?
How many posts does your blog need to have per day/week/month to get a decent “fan” base and viral benefit?
What percentage of your blog posts have to be business like if it is a business blog?
How many friends do you need to share on Facebook/Twitter before you would trust someone to be worth befriending or following even if you don’t know them personally?

Lastly, if you could, help pull my personal plane by following me on Twitter http://twitter.com/jimbanks and also help pull our network plane by following it on Twitter http://twitter.com/globaldirect

I look forward to collating your comments on this post and turning it into another blog piece.

Just as an fyi I work on 20 shared friends on Facebook and I’ll accept the opinion of those 20 people that the person trying to connect is not a douche bag.

What say you?

Oh and interestingly enough in my research on the Facebook fan pages I saw Obama way out in front and the second most popular page with a fan following….

Homer J Simpson

Tags: blogging, facebook, Social Media, social networking, twitter