Next

Continuing my musical theme of the last two days, today I want to bring your attention to one of the most exciting bands I ever saw live, in a small club in Birmingham in the mid 1970s: The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. SAHB, as they were usually abbreviated, were a gritty band with great theatrical presence who made a real connection with their audiences.

In 1973 they released their album “Next”, the title track being a translation of a Jacques Brel song. The lyrics are here and I want to look at the final line of the fourth verse: “I stand on endless naked lines of the following and the followed”. Leaving aside any mention of nudity (the way that people dress in front of their computers is a matter for them and their webcams), the “endless lines of the following and the followed” is a great visual metaphor to the way that some people approach the use of twitter.

Read many Social Media blogs and you would be forgiven for thinking you were worthless unless you have at least 1,000 followers, and there are countless advertisements for applications or indeed Social Media Managers who promise to get you thousands of followers in a ridiculously short time. Ignore them.

Focus instead on the market that you are trying to address. Who are your customers? What are they like? What do they do? What else do they buy? Who are the key influencers in your market segment, and what are they saying? Having done that, you can build a target list of people to follow and that way you will have a quality list, not one artificially inflated with hundreds of students from random countries who will never in a million years be interested in you or your business.

Find your audience and connect with them, just like The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.