Twitter – Stop Chasing the Follower Count

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 The next time you see a Twitter account with 500,000 followers, which is following 450,000 in return, realize that the account is largely useless…

 

As a business looking to promote your goods or services across the internet you may, at some point, decide that social marketing is the way to go.  Facebook can get you some of the way there, particularly (in the beginning) with your own circle of friends, but another popular option is the use of Twitter.  Twitter, in a way, is an infinitely better setup for broadcasting your message to millions, as its privacy policy has never really been under scrutiny. Twitter has always been deemed a very public space where people can post whatever they wish, and all other users can choose to opt in or out of the tweets.

When you first setup your account and post a few updates, you may be surprised to find some people have already decided to follow you.  Hurray, you’re a star!

Unfortunately you will probably notice that most of these users have no discernible connection to you. So why did they decide to follow you so quickly?  They are, in fact, just hoping that you will follow them back…perhaps out of courtesy.  This will increase their follower count, making them look more important on Twitter.  They may even wait a period of time before discreetly un-following you, so you end up listening to their endless stream of junk with no benefit to yourself.

Most people who are on Twitter to market are not there to absorb information, but to broadcast it.

People can quickly fall into this trap of chasing a larger follower count.  It’s great to think that 10,000 or even 100,000 people are following your every tweet, but in reality how many of these people are really reading the updates?  Most people who are on Twitter to market are not there to absorb information, but to broadcast it.  Twitter is an inter-continental shouting match in which everyone is trying to get everyone else to listen.

Instead of focusing on how many followers you have, focus on the type of followers you have.  One real follower is worth 1000 fake ones.  Your job on Twitter is to get more people to know about your business and ultimately buy your product or service, not to become a Twitter superstar.  The next time you see a Twitter account with 500,000 followers, which is following 450,000 in return, realize that the account is largely useless. It would seem that nearly half a million people will be receiving those tweets…but in reality they are just being sent out into the cloud and falling on deaf ears.

So remember kids, it’s all about the quality of your followers, not the quantity. Focus your message on a very narrow group of people to create followers that will work for your business…not just a thousand people whose message will fall on deaf ears.

 

Future feature! 

Keep an eye out for a future article on the wonderful world of outsourcing!  To further your social reach, if you have the budget, hiring consultants like Mark Gregory of Marketing By Web – an online marketing company specializing in SEO in bristol and adwords management services – is a wonderful way to go. You focus on what YOU do best, and they pick up the slack in the areas you…well…you slack IN.

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Related articles

• How to use Twitter to market your company (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
• When is the best time to tweet from my business Twitter account? (marketing.yell.com)
• How well is your Twitter profile REALLY doing? (marketing.yell.com)

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