We're All Friends Here, Right?

From time to time, I’ll get the occasional e-mail that offers the magic pill that creates “social media conversions” of some form or another. These are those marketing tutorials, research results, online white papers, and such that purport to have the secret to getting more people to buy/read/consume whatever product or service you offer.

And to be sure, a lot of that information is very helpful, especially when it comes to social media. I’ve incorporated several tips and suggested practices in an attempt to get our social media more active. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. And it strikes me that a lot of the results don’t depend on me or the rest of the team.

It depends on you.

Here on the main site, we have 372 subscribers getting a notification every time we post a new article. On YouTube, we have 327 subscribers who get a notice when we post a new video — which is at least once a week. While on Twitter, there are 2,024 folks keeping an eye on us. Pinterest, it’s only 47. But that’s 47 we didn’t have before we got on Pinterest. And on Facebook, we have 757 “likes” at the moment.

So, assuming there’s some overlap on some of this, let’s assume we have roughly 3,000 regular followers across our online platforms. That’s quite a good number for a small operation like ours, and it’s a number that grows at a steady clip. The question now becomes: how do we convert those numbers?

Well, let’s define “convert” first. For each channel, it might be a little different. Certainly for the social media, we want to drive traffic to our main site and get people reading our articles. We also want to get more eyeballs on our YouTube videos and more ears on our podcasts. So for each channel, we present the information or photo or video or audio file, along with something you can click — like, share, download, read, subscribe, etc. This calls for interaction on your part, yes, but it’s not very time consuming and doesn’t require a lot of physical effort. All you have to do is point and click.

Therein lies the rub. How do we get the 2,024 Twitter followers to click on a link to watch a video or listen to a podcast? How do we get the Facebook crowd to share an episode recap or the latest Week in Review video? How do we get regular visitors to our main site to read anything outside of the home page? Because for as big a crowd as we’ve collected, you’re not doing a whole lot.

And that’s got to be my fault. Right? As the editor, I’m responsible for the overall lay of the land here, and while 2014 has so far been rolling quite well in terms of getting our volunteers moving in the same direction with a little more internal organization and goal-setting, I still have yet to crack open the right “magic pill” that gets you, the audience, to interact more with our site. So, here’s what I’m going to do:

I’m simply going to ask you nicely.

Would you please consider watching more of our videos on YouTube? Would you please consider sharing our articles with your like-minded friends over on Facebook? If you follow us on Twitter, a re-tweet every now and then would be most kind of you.

2014 is going to be full of new content. We’ve already rolled out the 3-Minute Recap, and the 3-Minute Review is not too far behind. You’ve asked for more movie and book reviews, and those are coming soon. We’re also re-tooling The Grid to bring you more video game news, and Comic Con Carne will be back for another season starting this month. We may even dabble a bit in live radio and original fiction.

SciFi4Me was named such for a particular reason. So when you say “sci fi for me” it means each and every one of you. This is sci fi … for me. And for you. Let’s enjoy the ride together.

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