Did you know 80% of Your Facebook Fans are Meaningless?

You know the 80/20 adage, right? The rule of thumb that states 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers? I don’t know if that’s true in the summer camp field – I'm guessing it's probably not. But I do know this: if you’ve got lots of Facebook fans, twitter followers and blog subscribers, most likely a very small percentage of those people represent a very large number of your site visitors. So the 80/20 rule applies here, and I'll give you an example.

One of my Facebook pages has almost 14,000 fans. But only a precious few actively visit the page, comment, post photos or otherwise participate. Among those who do, it's the same people every time. Same goes for most of my other other websites, fan pages and blogs.

At first I was frustrated by this. I beat myself up trying to figure out how to engage the vast majority of people who weren't participating. Then I realized it didn't matter.

I realized the way to make social media really work is to "fish where the big fish are." And in this case 20% represent big fish and 80% represent sardines.

It’s that small 20% who mean the most to you. They're the ones who feel most connected to your camp and have influence over their friends. So don’t waste your time on the sardines even though there's lots of them because the vast majority are meaningless to you. Engage that small 20% and you'll be set.