I had to learn the hard way that vanity numbers don’t help.
So a friend of mine was a little upset the other day because someone she interacted with on Twitter unfollowed her out of the blue. She got unfollowed because she didn’t follow this account back. My friend felt a little hurt because she was starting to build a bit of a friendship with this account. She realized she wasn’t following the guy and wanted to fix that. It was a bit of a surprise to see he unfollowed her because she didn’t follow back.
Bad move. The optics look a whole lot better when you’re following people you want to follow (even if they don’t follow back) than when you reduce your follow rate to keep some arbitrary ratio in place. The whole follow for follow, like for like crap doesn’t work it’s all vanity.
It’s all numbers. I know personally when I was first getting started on Twitter it’s all I cared about. I was wrong. When I first got into Twitter I went to Fiverr and bought 5,000 followers for five bucks. All of them were fake, none of them interacted with me, none of them bought my stuff, and now they’re all gone because Twitter swept and got rid of all those fake accounts.
I mean it’s only five dollars–it cost me a foot long, but it didn’t help the way I thought it was going to. I thought big accounts had big followings. I thought numbers, even fake numbers, made the influencer because I thought it was all about perception.
But it was all fake. Fake numbers don’t matter. What matters is finding a community and using social media to interact with real people. Don’t go out there and only self-promote; don’t go out there saying follow for follow or like for like it’s not gonna work if you go into this only reaching out to get something in return. You can’t support someone to get support back. You can’t do good things and act as if people owe you for it. It’s not a sustainable business practice. You might get a sale or two, but you’re going to rub people the wrong way and hurt your brand.
It takes more work, but if you figure out your purpose, your vision, what messages you’re trying to convey on here, you can find the right community and once you do you can thrive.
R.K. Gold 