Contact Adhesion in Social Networking
Image by Cristiano Betta
A Related Example from Banking
In banking circles you’ll often hear marketing VPs talk about household penetration. The concept refers to the number of the bank’s products and services that a given household currently has. One of the ongoing goals, from the banks point of view is to increase household penetration.
The idea works something like this, if the bank can sell you on opening a safe deposit box, they know that even if they don’t make any upfront money on the rental of the box, that they have still done themselves a service.
Why is this the case? Because they know that the average safe deposit box holder visits the bank with much greater frequency then someone without a box. Every time they can get someone to set foot inside the bank is another chance for a customer service rep to sell them on whatever the product the bank is featuring that month.
Social Media Marketing Application
So let’s extend this idea to social media marketing (SMM). If you are starting out in a SMM campaign your first goal is to build a list of contacts. Your second goal is to develop a decent level of interaction with as many of these contacts as possible.
Obviously there is a limit to how many people you can develop such relationships with. The good news is that for most people involved in social networking, they are nowhere near this threshold. To use my above mentioned banking example, it’s like a bank with 1,000 safe deposit boxes that is only renting out 100 of them.
I wanted a term to describe what happens as you continue to interact with a particular contact, online. I struggled for a while since contact penetration just sounded wrong, the best I could come up with was Contact Adhesion.
Let me stop right her to point something out, the core idea behind this post is not particularly new or revolutionary. In fact with a quick search I would imagine that you could find quite a few posts written around similar themes.
What’s the point?
So why am I writing about it?… Because it’s essential! Everyone in the early stages of online business wants a method of generating traffic that costs them nothing out-of-pocket! Most people starting out would rather not pay for advertising especially considering the steep learning curve that is often involved before decent conversion rates can be achieved.
Off the top of my head I can think of four viable methods for generating traffic with zero out-of-pocket expense. They are social networking, social bookmarking, viral video, and search engine optimization. If you’re in the early stages of building your online business and SMM is one of your chosen methods of generating traffic, then you owe it to yourself to be concerned with the strength of your network. The good news is that these quality connections are sitting out there online, waiting to be made.
It’s this level of audience interaction that allows social media A-listers to summon traffic at a moments notice for whatever promotion they are currently working on. Using this traffic they can generate reviews, testimonials, subscriptions, blog comments, contest entries, you name it.
Contact Adhesion comes in two distinct flavors which we will be checking out in an upcoming post in a few days. Until then if you are interested in reading more about connecting with your audience, I recommend “How to Measure Engagement on Twitter” from The Caffeinated Blog, by Kari Rippetoe.
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