The Math Behind Solopreneur Influence, Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed how sharing your content leads to building your Influence (which leads to sales). We went over the Sharing Rate–the rate at which others share your content. But not everyone is going to share your stuff. The reason lies below.

The Sharing Defection Rate

Why would people defect from sharing your glorious content?

Three reasons: 1) noise pollution, 2) content disharmony or 3) lack of Social Proof.

The first reason—noise—is a reason they didn’t see your meme, despite it being shared with them. Maybe the Tweet/link never stood out to them. If you’ve sent out the best content in the world and you aren’t getting it opened, it’s possible that people just weren’t in front of their Facebook Wall or Tweet Deck. Or people are just overwhelmed with other stuff.

The second reason for defection is that it was seen but wasn’t liked enough to share it. Maybe it was poorly written. Or the people shared to weren’t your target market.

The last reason is that they just don’t trust your content, as evidenced by your low number of Followers. This is your lack of Social Proof. Social Proof is visible evidence of others approving of you. Distrust doesn’t mean that they are worried per se, but they don’t want to waste their time opening another piece of junk. People are looking for a signal that it’s worth their time…if someone has 400 Facebook Likes, the signal its sending to someone is that if others follow, they should give the content a try.

Forget my lack of Social Proof?

This is a huge barrier for me to overcome.

If you’re starting out like I am, you’ll have a lot of sharing defection.

We started Post 1 by illustrating the good news: people can share at an exponential rate. Post 2 is taking these numbers in the opposite directions and show why people stop sharing and following. From this point on, assume if someone drops out due to Sharing Defection (they stop sharing your content), they also don’t follow you.

Let’s continue our example and say our Sharing Rate is 50%. That means for every time your post is shared, half the people won’t share it again nor follow you.

On the table below, note that all fractions are rounded and they look uneven (for instance, the 2^nd share Sharing Defectors is 7.5—rounded to 8). I’ll be rounding throughout this post, so if you see a number split unevenly, that’s the reason. (Also, the starting share with 10 people isn’t showed in the table anymore, but its still being assumed.)

The table shows your low Sharing Rate of 1 with a Sharing Defection Rate of 50%. Over 4 generations of sharing, you will have created 49 followers.

Looking at the graph below, you can see the shares at the start of each generation, the defectors, the shares left after the defectors—all adding up to the number of cumulative Followers. The takeaway here is a lot of potentials helpers dropping out leaving you with a reduced number of Followers.

The graph shows a dramatically reduced number of followers after you consider Sharing Rate Defection. 39 (49–10) Followers is still an extraordinary number of additional Followers after one post, but there are a lot of other issues that will bring this number down to a level that we all know.

We’ll introduce the next issue—Increasing Defection Rates—below.

Increasing Defection Rates

We’ve been using a crazy assumption so far: Sharing Defection is constant through generations of sharing. However, this isn’t reality. The further away from your original connections you get, the more likely that people don’t know you and their niches/interests are diverge from yours. By the fourth generation of sharing, you should expect very few people to actually share your content (and follow you).

Think of the telephone game. Your message loses clarity as it gets passed on and on.

In our ongoing example, the Sharing Defection Rate is going to rise incrementally from 50% to 60% to 70% to 80%. This means the number of people sharing will be reduced from 50% to 40% to 30% to 20%. This is a realistic assumption for startup Solopreneurs that have negligible Social Proof (exhibit A: my Facebook Like box).

Of your 10 connections in the 1^st share, 5 will defect from sharing while 5 will share. Because of our assumption of “share = follow” (if you share, you follow OR if you don’t share, you don’t follow), your total Followers after one share are 10 + (10–5) or 15. In the 2^nd share, of your 15 Followers, 60% —or 9 of them— don’t share, leaving only 6 to share. The new people who get it shared with become Followers, giving you 21.

This process continues until your 10 Followers become 30, or a pickup of 20 Followers from one post.

If you compare the graph below with the previous one, you can clearly see that the rate of adding followers has been dramatically reduced because over half of the people getting content aren’t sharing with others. See how the curves are flattening out?

While these numbers have dropped, I would pay for that kind of return on one post. But… there are still some things left out of the model that we have to discuss.

While You’re at It, Tack on Increasing Following Defection Rates…

The starting Client-Focused Solopreneur valiantly tries to build a following. But without social proof and a “good” network, the chicken and egg problem emerges as it’s difficult to reach a tipping point of Followers without some to start with.

Clear the “share = follow” assumption we have used to this point. It was only there for simplicity but it’s another unrealistic assumption.

We read lots articles, share a bunch of them, but only follow a fraction of them. Unless the article is tremendous or we think that the person is important, we don’t follow someone.

Let’s call that the Following Defection Rate. Assume it’s also an increasing rate. So, of all the people who share your content, in reality, only a small portion of them actually follow you as we assumed in previous examples.

Taking this new piece of information into consideration, let’s recalculate. The first share would be to 10 of your connections. 50% defect from sharing, leaving only 5 sharing. Of those 5, only 50%, or 2.5 (call it 2) of them follow you.

You can see in the table and graph how flat the growth of your connections is through the generations due to the SD (Sharing Defection) and FD (Following Defection). The rate of following and sharing slows to such a large degree, that the 5^th round would show your post has stopped circulation.

See how flat the # of Followers curve has become:

So we are done the Debbie Down section. Defecting from sharing and following is not something anyone wants to hear, but it’s the reason it’s so darn hard to start from only a few Followers.

Remember, all of this math and graphing is to simply get a better understanding of what factors are responsible for contributing and undermining the creation of an online following. It’s nothing more than that.

Part 3 is going to talk about a few other factors that may help you.