Digital Footprints: The Real Power of Social Media Marketing

The Library vs. the Dinner Party

This is what I believe to be the power of social media marketing right here: the ability to have people see your content, engage with it, interact with it, and that data being fed back to you so you can do something with it. That last part is the part almost everybody misses.

Let me give you a comparison between a digital audience and an analog one. Targeting people with digital audiences is unlimited. It's like trying to find a book in a massive library. You have so many options you can't even pick one. Analog is a dinner party. Ten people. You look left, there's a friend. You look right, there's your wife or your husband. You look to the end of the table, that's it. That's all you can reach.

When it comes to analog, there are limits. When it comes to digital, there are absolutely no limits. Which means your game, your ability to win the attention game, is dominated by one thing only: your ability to master strategies, capture attention, and do the right thing on these platforms for long enough that you outdo your competitors and take that attention for yourself.

Why 17 Seconds Is a Win

Picture this. I put a video out. A person goes on Facebook and watches that video for exactly 17 seconds. Is that a good thing, or not so good because it's only 17 seconds?

Let me tell you, that is a very good thing. The average attention span in today's environment is somewhere around 5.5 seconds, and it's been going down every single year. Why? Because there's so much content being put out there, and every day there's more. Supply and demand drives price. Supply and demand also drives consumption of content. When people have endless options, you get fewer views, unless you know what you're doing and your content is good.

So when somebody gives your video 17 seconds in a 5.5-second world, that's a very valuable piece of information. And that information becomes what I like to call a digital footprint.

The Buckets: Where Footprints Go

Every footprint gets fed into a bucket, and there are many different buckets. There's a bucket called 25% video watchers. There's ThruPlay watchers, the metric Instagram and Facebook use for somebody who watched 15 seconds of your video. There's 75% video watchers. Website visitors. The buckets keep on going. They're all buckets of digital footprints, and whenever somebody interacts, they get placed in one depending on what they did.

Do the math on that ThruPlay bucket. If a video is one minute long and somebody watched 15 seconds, that's 25% of the video. Fifteen seconds is a lot of time. That is a very, very good audience right there.

My world of supplement brands, which generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is built around this concept. Because once people are in those buckets, I create ads, marketing messages, video messages, images, graphics, articles, podcasts, everything, and I place it right in front of them to introduce them to products and services that solve their particular problem.

Footprints Expire: Use It or Lose It

Here's the detail most people never learn. The data about video watching expires after a year. If somebody watched 50% of your video 365 days ago, tomorrow that connection gets separated and you don't have that data anymore.

That's why these footprints are, without a doubt, time sensitive. If you don't use it, you lose it. You've got to retarget, put a message in front of that person again, as soon as possible, so you can build the relationship while the footprint is still warm.

And this is the core of how we operate: we don't sell to people that have not been put on this digital footprint path. We sell to people that are exposed to our content in some way, shape or form. That is the real power of social media.

Go Look Inside Meta and Build Your Buckets

I'll show you how this looks in the real world. Inside Meta, in business.facebook.com, inside one of my accounts, I can see audiences like: people that watched Frank Suarez ThruPlay video views on Instagram in the last 80 days, 10,700 people. On our other channel, MetabolismoTV, one audience is 3.6 million people in a single time window. We put content out there across all these platforms, thousands of times a month, we give people value, and then we introduce them to our products and services.

You can do the same thing. Click Create Audience and Meta gives you the options: people that visited your website, interacted with your app, a customer list, people that watched your videos, people that engaged with your Instagram account, people that shopped on your website, your Facebook shop, your Shopify site. Anywhere except Amazon, by the way. You're not going to get that data directly on Meta.

These digital footprints are why I want followers in the tens of millions for our brands, and why we work so hard at building a social media strategy. Every piece of content is not just a post. It's a net that catches attention and hands you the data to follow up. Build the footprints first. Then sell.