BRX Pro Tip: Don’t Confuse an Audience with a Network
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips, Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, describe the distinction between an audience and a network.
Lee Kantor: An audience are people who might know who you are, but you don’t know who they are very well. And a network are people that have an actual relationship with you. And that’s an important distinction.
Lee Kantor: If you’re just trying to build an audience of a lot of kind of semi-anonymous folks, so you have a number to brag about, that’s fine. That’s worth something, I guess, for some people. But for me and my colleagues and my business partners, it’s more important to have a network of people that actually know who you are, that you know who they are, and you have an actual relationship with them.
Lee Kantor: Ten thousand followers or something might have an appearance of visibility or have an appearance kind of value. But I would much rather have a few hundred people that I have a meaningful relationship with that know me, that I know them, that I can introduce to other people, that they can introduce me to other people, that I can refer business to them, that they can refer business to me, that I have a partnership with. That’s way more valuable to me.
Lee Kantor: And most people need just a few hundred meaningful relationships. They don’t need tens of thousands of anonymous followers. And I think that’s where a lot of folks get distracted, because there’s so much social media noise about building an audience, about these kind of cosmetrics we talk about in terms of clicks and followers and things like that.
Lee Kantor: Focus on human beings, focus on human-to-human relationships. That’s a network. That’s a group of people that can really move the needle in your business. Hoping some random anonymous person stumbles upon you and then buys your stuff is just not a good strategy for most professional service providers.
Lee Kantor: So today’s challenge, pick one person who regularly engages with you and your content, and move them from some passive connection into an actual conversation, a human-to-human interaction. If you do that relentlessly, you will grow your network. And a network is a much better area to focus in on rather than growing an audience of anonymous people.
