Page 70 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

would even be publicly embarrassed if I raised nothing. Still, this was a worthy
charity in need, so I decided to follow my heart, take a risk, and ask for help.

I wrote a blog post1 revealing a personal story of my work with an at-risk
child and asked, entirely through social media, for a donation to support the
sponsoring charity. Even I was surprised at the success—I raised more than
$6,000 in one week! I was overwhelmed with joy and pride when I was able to
deliver that check to my friends at the charity before Christmas!

On one level, this triumph was inspiring because I realized it never could
have happened if I hadn’t worked for years building a loyal and engaged social
media audience. Without question, all the work I had poured into helping my
tribe enabled this achievement. But peeling back this layer reveals another lesson
about how truly difficult it is to move an audience toward action.

My charitable request blog post was shared nearly 750 times … but only 92
people actually made a donation. So in reality, more than 650 people encouraged
others to donate without donating anything themselves. Ugh.

This is an example of the immense challenge you face with weak social
media links. Many businesses and eager new bloggers make the mistake of
equating a large social media audience with power … and this is just not the
case.

Of the 92 people who donated, I had met 80 of them in real life. I had done
the work to convert these “weak” audience connections into “strong” personal
relationships. The average donation of my strong-link friends was $65. The
average donation of my weak-link social media connections was $15.

This means that out of 70,000 followers (at the time), only 12 people on
Twitter whom I personally did not know saw the “cold call” tweet asking for
help and did something about it. That’s a conversion rate of less than two-
hundredths of a percent, probably the least effective sales channel you could
ever imagine.

But it gets worse.
A couple of social media heavyweights with more than 100,000 followers
(and one with more than 500,000 followers!) pitched in to spread the word and
raise awareness for the charity. I estimated they generated more than 3 million
Twitter impressions. Here’s how many donors this intense activity generated:
ONE.
So the “celebrity influencer” conversion rate on Twitter was one out of 3
million possible impressions. Sad, but not surprising if you understand how
social media audiences work. When I personally asked for a donation, those with
an emotional connection built through trust over time—my Alpha Audience—
responded to me. When the influencers tweeted, it was like throwing a message