Posts tagged business relationships


How do you handle a crowd of followers?

Jun 25th

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My article on “Why do I need 10,000 followers” seemed to tap into the frustration and anxiety of many people who are struggling with the meaning of our new Twitter relationships. One Twitter friend, who I have never met, called me and discussed the issue for an hour!
If you haven’t read some of the blog reader comments, please do — they’re great! The article also enabled a lively debate on Linked-In. I wanted to cross-pollinate the conversations and those folks allowed me to re-print just a small selection of their insights:

Steven Soshea

“If I happened to accumulate 10,000 followers through organic growth, I would consider that to be a good thing. There’s no way you can have “an effective, reasonable connection” with everyone … Like a famous musician, actor, or even writer, you’re not going to be able (or want) to spend all of your time connecting with your fans.
“To be quite blunt, I’m only going to spend a certain amount of time with them, collectively and individually. So my engagement with Twitter isn’t going to scale proportionally to the volume of my followers … I’m very happy to have this asymmetric relationship …”
“Once I was following 400+ I found that it was just too much to keep up the same quality level of interaction. That web page just seemed like a huge wave of noise coming at me. One approach I’ve found helpful is to segment and to create individual Twitter ID’s for different sectors with which I work … I also use Tweetdeck or Seesmic to review the multiple accounts independently or collectively at a glance.”

 

Nancy Scott
“Before I follow, I read somebody’s blog carefully to see if I can connect with their knowledge and their perspective. I started out primarily following marketing bloggers, but have expanded to following all manner of folks who interest me.”

 

Mark Ruvelson
“I’m not sure what the magic number is as far as how many followers you should have, or how many people you can actually keep up with following … I have a friend who’s tweeting on behalf of his business, and his approach is to follow as many people he can and grow his community through follow backs. OK, so he has close to 2,000 followers, I have just around 300. Is his group more valuable than mine? Larger yes, but maybe not better, as I’m not so sure how relevant some of his followers are. I’ve chosen not to follow his approach; I feel like the right thing for me anyway is to keep on posting clever, interesting tweets, and let the community grow at its own pace.”
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Why do I need 10,000 followers?

Jun 23rd

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Photo credit: I don’t know. Probably some porn site. This is an actual Twitter follower of the guy mentioned in the article. If this is a picture of you and you’re not in the porn industry, I apologize. I was just trying to make a point. Now go put on a tee shirt.

The other day I received a direct message on my Twitter account that gave me pause:

Mark – why so few followers when it seems you have great content? Is that part of your strategy? Just looked-thought it would be more …

At first I felt defensive. Well — I LIKE my 400 followers. I’ve only been doing this a few weeks. That seems pretty good. Right??

So I decided to check out the guy who sent me the message. He has over 12,000 followers and 700 connections on Linked-in. I felt Twitter Envy swelling in my chest. Is it possible to exhibit alpha male behavior on Twitter?

I looked over his list of followers and what I found astounded me. Many of them had names like “HelpYouMakeCash” or “Psychic123.” Tons of them had names like “pS5bo1g6″ with no photos. And a very high number featured icon photos with women baring their chest, or nearly so. Who would brag about a community filled with this stuff?

When I get followers bearing (baring?) those attributes I knock ‘em out. First, I’m not in the same game that they are. Second, I would not want any one in my Twitter community I would not proudly introduce to my kids.

What’s the point of all of this social media stuff anyway? I’m writing this blog and Twittering on a regular basis to contribute to the dialogue with a group of insanely cool people. I have learned SO MUCH from you guys out there. I like my new online peeps. I get excited when you respond to a blog post or RT one of my Tweets.

I genuinely want to CONNECT with my growing community but already have some concerns as the followers grow each week. At some point I think it will become too much and I haven’t thought of a next step. I want to be a good community member. Is that possible with a thousand followers? How do we build a sustainable, manageable community with a meaningful dialogue?

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