One of the things I am coming to understand more of. Or more accurately remembering, is that social media is about 1 on 1 contact. It’s about developing relationships with people. And yes although you can advertise on social media, that’s not its primary purpose. It’s simply about connecting with people one person at a time.
I think when you are starting a business you can forget that. It’s one thing to create a product or service it’s quite another to have that product and or service discovered in the market place. Enter Twitter.
I’ve been looking more at the people who follow me and have gleaned something after staring at who makes up my ‘followers’. I’ve determined that I needed to pare down who was on my list. For example, I just had a individual follow me who has almost 7 thousand followers! Wow I’m impressed. I looked at who he follows, and again almost 7 thousand people. Now that’s quite a lot of people to keep track of, and I doubt this person has ‘relationships’ with all these people. They follow him, he follows them. Quid Pro Quo. But then I looked at the number of tweets he tweeted. 9. Yep the actual number 9. Not Ninety. Not Nine hundred, but 9. So I ask myself. ‘Is this someone I want to follow?’ I mean he obviously doesn’t put out content. Not with just 9 tweets. He’s not being social. He’s collecting numbers. Maybe he’s famous enough that he deserves those numbers, I don’t know. But can I expect him to retweet something, let alone read something that I post. I highly doubt it. I’m probably just another notch in the followers game that can be Twitter.
And that I do not want to become. So I’m doing a purge. Really looking at who I am following. Are they sociable? Are they just an internet placeholder in the twitter verse? Because, I don’t want someone to unfollow me because I never interact with anyone, or haven’t post in over a year. Yep there are some haven’t said a thing on Twitter in over a year.
Then we have the ‘promoter.’ The promoter is the person who follows me in the hopes that I will ask them how I can get thousands of twitter followers yet they themselves have virtually none. I mean come on, at least have a follower list that remotely is impressive enough to want me to say, “Wow yeah I’d like those number.” but nope. I’m followed by what I now see are just Twitter bots or spam. Oh well.
So I’m purging the list. Id’ rather have 100 great followers, than 1000 who barely know I exist. So hence I am now using unfollowersme.com and I must admit. It’s been eye opening. I’d suggest you try it if you’re a Twitter user.
What about you? What lessons have you learned in your experience of being on Twitter? What observations come to mind? Any pointers to share?
Comment below! I actually do comment back! 🙂
D