Do you know this kind of person?
LinkedIn ….8750 followers
Facebook…..6500 Friends
Whatsapp….1000 contacts
Instagram…..15000 Followers
Twitter …….8000 Followers
That’s most likely your friend, a colleague or even you. This means one thing and one thing only, you have influence, influence means power. With power comes responsibilities. What are you doing with this much power in your hands, is it helping you grow, are you disseminating any kind of knowledge or are you just sending jokes?
The biggest advantage we have with social media is that its very easy to collect data particularly contact data but the problem is that we don’t know how to mine the data. There is currently big money being paid by giant companies for statistical data mining and most websites always have that disclaimer on the bottom that says, “we will collect data from you entering this website so please agree to that”. That is the information they use to mine the data. Sadly, we think this information is for big companies only and they should do clever things with it.
Let me tell you an interesting thing, without the fancy jargon, data mining is simply going through the large number of contacts you have to get the information that you need from it and make it useful to you. You have 5000 friends on your Facebook, how many are in the field that can help you achieve your objectives, you have 11 000 followers how many have the qualifications that can help you grow, you have 1000 contacts…how many of them know someone else personally who can connect you to that needed person. You follow 1000 influencers on Twitter, have you tried to engage them on your brilliant business idea. If you are an established business, all these are potential customers, get to know them and customise your product to suit them.
Social media is a great tool for entertainment but its also a great place to network. And a lot of times the people we need to get us to the next level are in our pockets. There are some schools of thought that even say your network should determine your networth, you will be surprised by the power in your network. And a fact, people love to work with who they know before considering an outsider….availability bias…it works.
Think about your social media activity differently.
