Who are our social media followers?
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| Dorothy assembles her motley crew of followers along the Yellow Brick Road |
Just like Dorothy on her odyssey along the Yellow Brick Road, we all want to have followers, whether it is our Facebook page or our LinkedIn profile. Social media has spawned the age of the
follower and the need for everyone to show that they have a large following in
business or personally. Numerous blog
posts and articles loudly proclaim ’10 Ways to increase your Twitter followers’
or ‘How
to drastically increase your Twitter followers’, offering tips and
techniques to increase your follower numbers. Most of the techniques are valid
and usually ethical, but there are
plenty of sites and Twitter accounts out there that
offer to increase your followers through less reputable means (see ‘Fake
Followers’ below).
Some of the largest Twitter followings belong to
celebrities, such as Katy Perry and Adele, whereas the brands that have some of
the highest
corporate following are the accounts of Starbucks and Samsung. Recently I was keen to add to the followers
on my Twitter account for Windsor Training, @windsortrain and in the process
I started to wonder about who followers are and what might their motivations be?
I was intrigued why some people chose to follow me and why others chose not to
and I wondered what this tells us about the anatomy of a follower and what we
can expect from them as a result.
I chose the individuals and organisations that I wanted to
follow, because they already seemed to be interested in business issues that
might also suggest a pre-existing interest in the types of topic that I was
blogging about and the sort of services that Windsor Training offers, covering
a range of business and management subjects. I am talking here from the perspective
of the small or medium sized business, rather than the large corporate. I am
also going to consider followers to social media in general, rather than to any
one service in particular.
From my reflections I came up with a typology, or anatomy,
of the social media follower:
Category 1: Friends,
family and business acquaintances
These tend to be the most loyal of your follower base – subject,
that is, to divorce or the end of a business relationship. They know you
personally and they have had some kind of relationship with you, either
business, personal, or both. They follow
you because they are genuinely interested in what you have to say and they can
usually be relied upon to interact with you on a regular basis. Unless you have
a large client base or family, they also tend to be small, so trying to build a
large following from amongst Category 1 is unlikely.
Category 2: ‘Fan’
Followers
These are people who follow you because of some engagement they
have had with you: perhaps they read a blog post that they agreed with or you
responded to a tweet and they liked your comments. Perhaps they use your products or services and
want to know more about what you offer or benefit from your expertise. These followers are the most valuable,
because they have come to you because of some interaction with them, whether
through social media or because of other online or offline marketing
engagement.
Category 3: ‘Follow-me-back’
Followers
These are followers who are following you in the hope of
some reciprocity: they expect that you will follow them back. They can be fickle and also short-lived. Some Twitter accounts with multiple thousands
of followers can follow you, in the hope that you will follow back, only to
rescind their following of you in a few days’ time when they hope you won’t
notice. Building a following from
amongst the ranks of the follow-me-back followers is unlikely to enable you to
build a following of people who are genuinely interested in your message or the
products or services that you offer.
They are more interested in broadcasting their own message to you and
with little interest in any interaction or dialogue.
Category 4: Fake
Followers
Needless to say this is not the type of followership that
you want to develop, although the larger your following, the greater the risk
that, unwittingly, some of that number may well be fake. In 2012, Twitter
reported that nearly 83 million accounts, which was roughly 10% of users at
that time, were fake. They are usually
created by a program that is intended to create fake identities and it scrapes
data from Twitter and beyond, which is
why their feed is often full of nonsense and non-sequiters. The only way to avoid
them is to vet what your follow has tweeted or run your followers through any
number of applications, such as JustUnfollow.
There are scores of sites where you can buy these fake followers, but my advice
is … don’t. Fake followers reflect badly
upon your business and celebrities
and politicians that have tried to buy followers have had scorn heaped upon
them.
The object of this post is to consider the types of follower
that we encounter on various social media, rather than to prescribe any
techniques to increase that following (which is something that I will examine
in subsequent articles). Of the types
that I have categorised here, 1 is most likely to relate to the followership
you develop when you first start out, because you will reach out to your
friends, but in time your client base will increase and so will your followers
of this type. 2 relates to followers who you have engaged with and they should
be nurtured and interacted with on a regular basis, with interesting and relevant
content. Finally, categories 3 and 4 are unavoidable, but basic precautions
involving software and vigilance can help identify them.
Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net
Picture Credit: By CBS Television Network. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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