Your Tribe will Build You

When the social media movement came along with the promise to build my tribe, I truly hoped it would pass me by. I was already working crazy hours to build my business and doing the things necessary to build relationships – attending local workshops, lunch and learns and nearly every mixer in town – though I despised nearly every one of them…the events, not the people. This social media ‘thing’ was going to demand more time than I wanted to give, time mostly learning how to do it, and I was building my tribe.

But the promise was that I could build my tribe beyond my local community. It was unavoidable in our new times and I got on board. So, I created profiles on all the major platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and You Tube), stayed consistent with my branding across and now had a presence. A presence was good and better than having none (I actually having a three year old run with a collaborative business partner that started simply because I had a presence), but it is passive and no more effective than having a great business card that I only hand out if someone asks for it. It was necessary for me to engage with the people I was beginning to connect with.

It was one thing to spend the time figuring out how to create profiles, but to have to spend time engaging with my new contacts and trying to stay on top of the latest posts (which frankly, most people put a lot of unimportant and disinteresting crap out there) was way more than I was willing to give. I am a big fan of getting a return of investment of my time and energy, as I’m sure you are. Besides that, I really didn’t have a strategy for engaging people and that coupled with the time element, I was at best intermittent in my frequency and inconsistent with my message – killers for any social media campaign – and my engagement on social media sucked!

About that time, there were these ‘experts’ in social media campaigns that were popping up (a need creates opportunity) offering to not only strategize the campaign, but to maintain the strategy. That was exactly what I needed. After going through a few (like with all else, there are those who say they can do and those who can do), I have an incredibly gifted team today.

During one of my missteps along the way, I was lead to believe that numbers was the game we were playing (more numbers meant bigger tribe, greater reach, bigger tribe) and there were all kinds of tricks to getting the numbers. And so, we (my former team and I) set out to increase the numbers - ‘followers’ and ‘likes’, ‘connections’ and ‘subscribers’. And the numbers went up, and up and yet…I had no more engagement than when I started because I didn’t have believers. I had numbers, but not followers. And so after I fired that team, I did a begin-again.

And five paragraphs later, the important message to take away is that building your tribe is not about the numbers of people that ‘follow’, it’s about people who follow and believe in you and your way. Social media is important and a means for creating followership beyond your local community, but building your tribe is about weeding out those who don’t believe. It’s about pissing off and even violating the sensibilities of those who just don’t get you so they will leave. You want your followers to be your believers.

So, forget about the numbers and engage with your tribe. Get and be clear about who you are and what you stand for and believe in. Get great at what you do and create a movement. Your tribe will find you and decide to follow you because the tribe always chooses who it will let lead them – regardless of the numbers.