Why Do your Contacts Stop Following You on Social Media?

This article looks at 7 reasons why you might be losing followers on social media, such as LinkedIn, and asks whether you should be worried about it and what you can do about it if you are

Parents and psychologists will tell you that children can be seriously traumatized by being 'unfriended' on Facebook, or other social media, and the word has even passed into the dictionary to signify an abrupt cessation of friendship. Whilst as businesses we might not need counselling for our separation anxiety over the loss of a contact, we do need to consider how and why it is happening and whether we need to do something about it.

Sometimes you're up, sometimes your down

With a large number of connections and followers, I do notice that on a daily basis there can be some fluctuation in the numbers, most of the time it is in the upwards direction, but sometimes you spot that you've lost one. In Twitter it's easy to spot, because applications such as JustUnfollow allow you to track this, but it is less easy to identify on LinkedIn, unless you have a small number of contacts and you know who they are.

So what are the 7 reasons why we sometimes lose followers?

My focus here is on the individual LinkedIn or Twitter account, rather than the large corporate social media machine:

#1: 'Over-sharing'

This is the social media equivalent of "too much information"! 'We are what we share' and people will make judgements about us as a connection, by the type and quality of things that we 'like' and distribute on social media. Over-sharing has entered the lexicon as suggesting we are distributing too much stuff that is not relevant to all or some of our contacts. Some contacts will take exception to what they judge to be 'over-sharing' and unfollow you as a result.

#2: Inappropriate Sharing

Some of your contacts will have a fairly fixed perception that LinkedIn, for example, is a business social platform and if you share too many amusing pictures or you ask them too many times to 'solve this if you are a genius', then they may actually reciprocate by un-following you.

#3: Follow/Unfollow

This is specific to Twitter and it's a conscious strategy to build a large following by avoiding the platform's follower limits and encouraging contacts to follow them, by following you first and then un-following you later. It's a brutal, but sometimes effective strategy, for those who want to build a list of connections fast and they're not bothered how they do. You can often spot the follow-unfollow practitioners by the fact that they start following you and yet they have a disproportionately large number of followers compared to the number they themselves are following. Do you follow?

#4: Open/Closed Network Ethos

Open networkers tend to view social sharing as something that is beneficial with as large and diverse a group of contacts as possible. The trade-off is that you may receive postings and messages that aren't entirely relevant to you, but you accept that as part of the territory. Closed networkers, on the other hand, tend to view their social networks as part of their inner circle and they are less tolerant of accepting invites from people they don't know or receiving messages that they feel are irrelevant to them.

#5: "Spring Cleaning"

You may simply lose followers because they have closed their account, moved to another job and can't access their old profile, or they've passed away, or even ceased to see social media as relevant to them. It's inevitable, so I wouldn't worry about it.

#6: You've upset them somehow

You remember that guy from the office whose name you can't quite remember and who you ignored at the Christmas party, well now he's getting his own back in the only passive-aggressive way he he knows how. And, you know what, he secretly hopes you'll notice too! Don't worry about it.

#7: You're a Spammer!

Probably one of the most heinous and unforgivable crimes that anyone is capable of on the Internet: sending large volumes of unwanted and unrequested posts, messages, or emails, without the consent and permission of your contact. Expect to be unfollowed if you do this! However, what constitutes spamming, can be interpreted fairly broadly and you may find that one person's spammer is another's beneficial sharer.

Should you be worried?

If you are actually haemorrhaging followers, then you have got a serious problem and you need to do something drastic, but chances are that you might be engaged in #7, so you are getting what you deserve! The numbers you will lose from #5 'Spring Cleaning' and #6 'because you have upset someone' - unless you make a habit of it - should be mercifully small.

If you lose someone because they have more of a #4 'closed network ethos', then you may have overstepped the mark and they've unfollowed you as a result. On Twitter, #3 'follow/unfollow' practitioners can be spotted very easily by looking at the follower-following ratio and it's only a problem if you are particularly bothered by it.

The 'Sin of Over-sharing'

Finally, there is 'oversharing' and sharing inappropriate content. This, however, boils down to the basic truism of marketing: 'know your audience'. If you have a range of contacts with whom you are familiar and you know that they like the amusing stories and the pictures that you send, then there's no harm, unless you've judged it wrong and they're heading for the exit! 'Oversharing' is another subjective judgement and it's almost a polite way of saying that you think someone is a spammer. If they really are uninterested in the content that you are sharing and, providing it is appropriate and not excessive, then they may have very little relevance as a connection anyway and may not be such a great loss.

What can I do about it?

So if you are worried by it, here's 5 Golden Rules that might just save you from being 'Billy-no-Mates' on social media:

1. Know your audience and share what you and they like.
2. Don't treat it as a one-way street - engage with the content of your connections, as you would expect them to engage with yours.
3. Expect that you will lose some contacts, because it's inevitable, but don't become obsessed by trying to find out who they are or why they've done it, because you'll just go crazy!
4. Try and keep the amusing stuff, and the mathematical conundrums, to a minimum and largely for Facebook!
5. Accept that social media is about 'give and take' and use it to further your contacts, but remember to help others and you'll be surprised how willing others will be to help you, which is what networking is all about.

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Other recent and popular posts by Will:

4 Ways to Give Effective Criticism at Work

Job Interviews: Don't Take it Personally

10 Reasons Why Psychologists Believe You Make Bad Decisions

Is It Time to Ditch the Elevator Pitch?

5 Things I have Learned from Being a Mentor

"Follow, follow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Who are our social media followers?

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.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, then please do, @windsortrain and if you have any thoughts and comments, even better.

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