AP 0807: How Do I Identify My True Fans?

AskPat 807 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 807 of AskPat, thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Barry, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.

FreshBooks is an awesome company that helps people manage their business finances. They've been helping me for years. They serve millions of small businesses, and what's really cool is they help you keep track of your income and your expenses, of course, and they do it in a really, really great way. But more than that, they help you with your invoicing, too, which means they help you bill your clients. So if you're a coach, or you do any consulting, or students of any kind, and you need to bill them, you can do it really quickly in a very professional way using FreshBooks. What's really cool is you can also have them track for you who opens those invoices, so you can follow-up with people who haven't yet.

It's really, really handy, and I use it myself, so check 'em out for 30 days for free by going to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

Alright, now here's today's question from Barry.

Barry: Hi Pat, this is Barry Pearman from Auckland, New Zealand.

First of all, just want to thank you for all that you do, you're a real inspiration. I blog about mental health on my blog called, turningthepage.info, and I've got a question around Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans. And it's easy to discover who your true fans are via your email list in the upper rights, and clicks and that sort of thing, but my question is how do you identify the 1,000 true fans on a social network, such as Twitter or Facebook? And then, isolate those people to a list, where you can follow and continue to develop stronger conversations.

Thank you for all that you do, and looking forward to hearing your response. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey Barry, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate this and I love where this is coming from.

You want to know exactly in your audience who are the top fans. Now I would argue, actually, that you are not finding your true fans by just looking at clicks and email opens and stuff like that. Yeah, that's going to give you a good indicator of who's following you and who's really interested. But, your 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly says, are those people who will fly to see you on a moment's notice, who will drive hundreds of miles to watch your concert, or who will buy anything and everything that you come out with before even reading the sales page.

Those are your 1,000 true fans, the people who if they were to each support you with $100 a year, you would have your six-figure income. And these are really important people to find. I'm actually writing a book about this topic as we speak. I think this is the first time I'm actually mentioning that, and yeah, so I'm just going to leave that out there and share with you that this is something that's really important to me. And I think is the most important thing in the world. More than getting more traffic, you want to get that traffic and convert that traffic into people who are these true fans like we were talking about.

So, these true fans, yeah I would argue against, well even email opens, and even clicks, and stuff like that. You want people who are going to be engaged with you, who are going to that level of really wanting to become some ambassador for your brand. And that only happens through many, many moments of interactions, and a lot of the interaction can be on a more automated basis, through email and social media and whatnot. But, more than that, you need to actually talk to these people and get to know them.

Who are they? What are their names? What are their likes? What are their dislikes?

The best way to get people to become true fans is to interact with them and ask them questions about how you can better help them. That's gonna help you stand out from everybody else in your space who's not doing that. But more than that, it's going help you be able to empathize with your audience and learn and hear from, in their own voice, what you can do to better serve them and better help them. And, even if that person doesn't necessarily become a true fan, you have a person that is a representative of somebody who can become a true fan, who you are now going to better serve. So, you are serving your audience better in whole as a result of doing that.

So I would actually try to get true fans in a way where you are plumping them together by having people vote to say, “Hey, yeah I'm actually a true fan,” by creating, for example, a special email list that you set up specifically for these people. You set up a landing page and say that these are for people who are your true fans and actually have them say to themselves, “Yes, I want more and I love what you do this much that I want to join this group.” Or, you can set up a private Facebook group, for example.

So it doesn't even matter where people are coming from, your email or social media or whatever. You can invite people, invite only, for example, to become a part of this group, and if they sign up, well then that's a good sign. If not, well then they're probably not a true fan even though they may have been very much engaged with you in many other spots.

So that's how I would actually “isolate them,” but I would even start to, in the beginning ages, or stages of your business, create a spreadsheet or a file, where you could actually have their names and their numbers or email addresses so you can personally reach out to them and start to talk to them. And, you'll start to get a feel of who your 1,000 true fans are that way, so try to isolate them into a specific group of some kind, and then, actually try to reach out to them personally and begin to create that group that way. You're gonna begin to see and notice people who are more active than others. That's what actually social media is great for. You can already, even more so than email, start to see who's more engaged.

There are tools out there that can help you find your top community members. There's top fan tools for Facebook, there's Commun.it for Twitter, and tools like SocialRank that can help you as well. But really I think it just comes with you getting to know your audience and just starting to understand and pick out those people who are the true fans and then do what you can to serve them. Treat them like gold, give them surprises, give them early insights, and behind the scenes looks on what you're up to. That way, they'll be even more raving fans and they will help spread the word for you and help you just organically grow from there.

Barry, thank you so much for the question. I hope that answers it or at least gives you some things to think about. I want to thank you by sending you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

And for everybody else listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, and thanks again to FreshBooks for their awesomeness. If you want to check 'em out for 30 days for free, go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and make sure you enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

And then, finally, here's a quote to finish off the day by Aldous Huxley, and that is, “Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.”

So all that to say, hey, if you're consuming content in any way, not just reading, but listening like on this show, or watching videos, you have power to magnify yourselves. Do that, and you'll see amazing results.

Cheers, thanks, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.