There are those who believe that social media is simply a numbers game. They will preach about getting thousands of fans and followers and hundreds of retweets and likes in an effort to get the most out of social media. They define engagement in ways that can be quantified – bigger is better from their perspective and bulk is king.
In many ways, they just don’t understand social media.
Size doesn’t matter. Presence is everything. While there can be an indirect correlation between the two, one thing is certain: there are small accounts with tremendous influence and huge accounts with none. Here’s why…
The Value of a Twitter Follower
Does anyone really believe that there are over 200 million people using Twitter? Despite the growth rate, in reality there are likely only around 14 million daily active users and 40 million monthly active users. What are the other accounts doing?
Many are just sitting there. People create an account, check out Twitter, and for one reason or another never return. They still have an account and will continue to have that account indefinitely.
In other cases, individuals or companies have multiple accounts. Sometimes, social media firms will have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of accounts tweeting out their messages. These accounts are not listening to anything. They are creating one-way sounding boards and hoping that through sheer bulk people will listen and click through to their links.
As a result, it’s very easy to build up accounts with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of “followers.” Twitter has cracked down more and more over the lasts couple of years on tactics such as mass following/unfollowing (known as churn), mass account creation, account validation, and tools to assist with followers. For ever measure they take, a dozen countermeasures are created to combat it. Spammers will be spammers.
If you send a tweet and only bots are getting the message, did you really tweet at all?
Not all followers are created equal. It’s better to have 100 engaged and active followers than 10,000 inactive accounts and bots.
The Value of a Facebook Like
On Facebook, it’s the same story with a different situation. Facebook is better than Twitter at keeping spam accounts at bay, but when you’re dealing with 600 million, some slide through. Millions, in fact.
How many Lindsay Lohan’s are there in the world that look like the rehabbing actress? Apparently, hundreds. What do these accounts do? They like things. They like pages. They like stories. They like affiliate links and malware sites.
For as little as 5 cents paid by a social media firm tasked with getting more “Likes” (formerly known as fans) to your Facebook page, they will like you as well.
Bulk is even less relevant on Facebook than it is on Twitter. A page with 100,000 artificial likes can actually have less power and receive fewer views than an active and engaging page with 1000 real likes. The Facebook promotional algorithm bases as much on quality as quantity, so if you have a message posted to your page and the right people like it, you can get tens of thousands of views. Dozens of the wrong “people” liking or commenting on your story is not only worthless but can actually hurt your ability to expose your message.
An entire article can be written about this dynamic and it’s becoming more complex as Facebook grows and learns.
Be Selective and Fight the Urge
The image above is not intended to toot our own horn or highlight the follies of others. It’s to prove a point. While Klout is not always completely accurate, it is a strong indicator of how influential an account has become.
Despite having a larger account, the socialpros are not very effective at getting out their message. They have a decent reach, but nobody they’re talking to is listening and few (if any) are retweeting/liking their messages. As a result, their bigger account is relatively worthless compared to ours.
Conversation. Engagement. Quality. These are all things that matter in social media. It isn’t that a growth strategy doesn’t work – it should definitely be part of your overall social media presence. Getting big and creating a “super account” with hundreds of thousands of worthless followers is, well, worthless.
It’s tempting. There are those that promise 50 thousand Twitter followers or Facebook likes for hundreds of dollars. While there are definitely growth services who are effective, the vast majority are only able to bulk up numbers. In many cases, these bulked numbers can do more harm than good.
Automation is another key aspect in a proper strategy. There’s a difference between using tools to effectively get your message out to the right people at the right time and automation schemes that allow you to “set it and forget it.” Those simply do not work. Facebook and Twitter are smart. Their users are even smarter. They can sniff out an RSS-fed account very easily.
Through engagement, you will be able to grow your accounts naturally. A quality account is worth ten times, even hundreds of times more than a bot or bulk account. Learn the techniques to grow your accounts effectively and avoid the bulking-up techniques or services that do not bring quality. As a general rule, if it sounds too good to be true… you get the picture.
