Page 69 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

CHAPTER FIVE

Building an Alpha Audience

“Today, artists get record deals because they have fans – not the other way
around.” – Taylor Swift

Content is merely the match lighting the fuse of an ignition plan. You have to
find the people to actually do it! You need to amass an Alpha Audience—an elite
and engaged tribe at the top of the social sharing food chain, the bedrock of your
business. Google research shows that these most loyal members of your
audience are more than 250 percent more likely to transmit your content!

To set the stage for our important work together on this subject, I’d like to
provide a short case study illustrating one of the biggest problems companies
face when it comes to activating their digital audience of friends and followers.

The dysfunctional social media audience

A few years ago, I decided to try something I had never done before (or since). I
asked my social media audience to donate money to support a favorite charity.

I had been working for a group that mentors inner city children, and the
world financial crisis had taken a bite out of their budget at a critical time.
Asking for money on the Internet is a notoriously difficult proposition. I
document this extensively in my book Return On Influence and point to several
examples where even celebrity-level influencers couldn’t move the needle and
create real action through tweeted pleas to their vast audiences.

The reason for this chronic failure is that social media connections begin as
weak relational links. Sure, we might be willing to help somebody out by
clicking a “Like” button or even sending a tweet once in a while for a good
cause … but opening our wallet? No. It normally doesn’t happen.

So, going into this project, the request for a donation was a precarious
proposition. I knew there was a good chance my appeal could fall flat. Perhaps I