As more and more organizations use all things social to attract audiences the issues of “spread” becomes a focal point for reaching the right audience.

In statistics, statistical dispersion is variability or spread in a variable of probable distribution. Probable distribution is important to distribution of relevant content in context with your audience.

Dispersion is contrasted with location or central tendency, and together they are the most used properties of distributions. If your content is not being dispersed to locations where your audience is then you are wasting efforts to attract the wrong audience.

Social technology follows the concept of “spread” in that the technology “spreads” messaging to “network clusters” of people using certain networks to reach “clusters” of people who may have an affinity to other people or relevant content. The affinity is based on numerous factors calculated by the different “networks” using individual and business profile data to determine “cluster affinity”. You can see this in action with numerous “network applications” indicating whom or what you may “like” or want to “connect” to.
Most people think of gambling when they hear the word spread. Spread is used in gambling to determine the odds. Social media is much like gambling because if you understand the “odds” of the game you can improve your “game playing” strategy and the related tactics. The social game is about connecting with the right audience and to win you have to focus on the issues in the 5 X 6 Social Media Matrix model in order to understand relevant issues that effect the “spread” of your audience.
Who Is Your Audience?

Many people and organizations make the mistake of not clearly defining their audience. Without definition of “audience” you could be “feeding” content to people and businesses that have no relevancy to your intent. Without relevancy to intent you end up increasing the “spread” rather than “decreasing” the spread.  When you increase the “spread” you reduce the probability of reaching the right audience channels. When you decrease the spread to improve the probability of winning by reaching the right audience.

The power of social technology, properly used, is in the “reduction of spread”. Traditional media has wasted trillions in mass marketing because of the waste associated with increased spread. Just like gambling spreads in context to betting, spread betting carries a high level of risk, with potential losses or gains far in excess of the original money wagered. Gains come from reducing the spread. Losses come from increasing the spread.

The spread for social media is influenced by a number of factors:

  1. The profile of readers attracted to your content (the audience)
  2. Supply or “float” (the total number of stories outstanding that are available to share and attract the audience). The search engines provide “float indexes”.
  3. Demand or interest in your content. Without demand and interest their is no hope for a transaction.
  4. Total sharing (trading) activity of your content. The higher the “trading activity” the more value is created with relevant audiences.
  5. The efficiency by which you decrease the “spread” and improve your productivity of the spread.

The graphic used in this post is a representation of relevant data I use to reduce my spread and improve my productivity. The data was generated by a tool called Flowtown. Flowtown is a marketing platform that helps businesses turn contacts into engaged customers. Flowtown helps make sense of all this data and turns it into meaningful output in the form of stronger business relationship by assessing your “spread”.

I loaded 1,000 of my readers into Flowtown. What does the data show? My “spread”. Will I use this data to improve the context of my content? I use other tools to determine other relevant “spread” data. Is it helpful to know your spread? You can bet on it!