Oh the drama!
With social media being the rage today, and a full gaggle of people preaching about how they can help you, you have to ask yourself what do I do?
Well what a great question, and I’m not going to answer it for you. I will give you some thoughts on twitter which you may find interesting.
So the story starts with:
An interesting thing happened to me on my way to the net today! I was doing some reading on the ole Twitter, and ran across a message about Fauxlowers? What is a Fauxlower? Well let me tell you.
It’s a fake follower, someone who follows you just to have you follow back, they have no interest in what you say. Doesn’t that just get your goose! Yeah ok, anyway.
So a number was tossed around something like 62.5% of all twitter followers are Fauxlowers. Which lead into a huge discussion about engagement. Now when I mean huge discussion, it was really me talking to myself, because I work at home with my cat, who really does not care about engagement.
Anyway, if a large percentage of your followers are only following you so you follow them and no one really cares about what you are saying, then have you accomplished anything or are you actually speaking to yourself and your cat. The answer is, sort of and not really.
Take a look at this really technical graph.
What you are seeing here is a representation of engagement. The only thing that matters in any marketing effort, especially from social media.
As the number of followers increase the percentage of people who respond decreases. So if you have 10 followers maybe 1 person responds, 10%, but if you have 1000 followers then maybe 10 respond, only 1%.
So are you better to have a smaller group with a higher level of engagement, Fauxlowers.com says probably, but I say NO. You still want as many followers as you can get. I’m going to clarify that, you want as many targeted followers as you can get. If you’re a Realtor in Miami, you want as many people looking for and living in Miami, as an example.
For two reasons:
1. More followers means more Social Proof that you are worth following and have something interesting to say.
2. More followers still means more engagment. 1% of 1000 is more than 10% of 10.
However, you still need to make an effort to interact, and as your followers grow it becomes a lot more difficult to be personal. Which is where Twitter Lists comes into play.
What’s the moral here, probably don’t talk to your cat as much. But if you want more great info about this subject go to Fauxlowers.com and subscribe to the newsletter, they have some great back issues and some good info on what happening in social media.
