The Point that Social Media Gurus are Missing

Folks, the post you’re about to read is a little different than the posts you usually see here.  It is longer, and rantier than anything I’ve ever posted here before. Despite that, I promise you that if you read it to the end, you will find a handful of intelligent sentences, and if you accept what I write, you will leave here smarter than the majority of the people in the “social media game.”  And if that isn’t enough, in this post, I’ll clearly spell out how to get thousands of followers on Twitter. Then I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t do it.

Where this is coming from

A few days ago, I logged in to Twitter to see what was going on.  I caught a tweet by Chris Brogan.  The tweet said:

“The only thing numbers do are up your odds of offending someone.”

Chris has over 100,000 followers on Twitter, and I’ve called him “the closest thing to an expert” in social media I’ve seen. I want it to be clear that what follows is not meant to slam Chris.  I’ve read his book (affiliate link), and I think you should too.  He’s a smart guy, and by all accounts, a nice guy.  He knows what he’s talking about.  But when a guy who has built a career out of social media says something like that, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to think, “Numbers also helped you get on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.”

It’s fine, though. I know what Chris was saying. It’s not all about the numbers. What got me to react was Chris’ next retweet:

“Ideas? RT @remarkablogger: @chrisbrogan People with low numbers don’t believe that for one second. What to do?”

I don’t believe that for one second.  I’m sure this wasn’t Chris or Michael Martine’s (aka remarkablogger) intention, but this got me worked up.  The suggestion that everyone that has low follower numbers is just itching to find a way to get more followers is false. It’s not about the numbers. Chris knows that. Michael knows that. Even people with low follower numbers know that.

So where is this generalization that everyone is chasing big numbers coming from? Simple, it’s coming from all the “experts” and “gurus” that are pimping products and services to help you and your business increase your follower numbers on Twitter.

There are a lot of people out there selling products that promise to teach you how to become a Twitter Super-Duper-Sexy-Guru-Rock Star.  The vast majority of them are trying to teach you how to get more followers on Twitter.  The same phenomenon goes on for Facebook fans, or MySpace friends, or LinkedIn connections.  Not only are these products a waste of money, they’re missing the point.

The people who are chasing numbers are the people who are doing it wrong.

Authenticity

Then I think about the people who are doing it right, like Chris, and how he’s teaching businesses to be authentic, to care about their audience, and to connect with them. The idea is to be totally transparent.  That can’t be wrong, can it?  That’s when I read a post by Naomi Dunford from Ittybiz, entitled: “Anti-Social Media: The Dark Side of Authenticity.”

If you stop reading this now, and go read what Naomi wrote, I’d probably be okay with that, because it’s that good.  If you’ve bookmarked the post and decided you’re going to go back to it later, here’s a quick summary.  Naomi writes about how a lot of the big guns in Social Media give advice about being authentic, but that we tend to forget that the big guns are usually advising big companies.  Big companies are impersonal by nature, so even when they’re being authentic, they don’t expose themselves to vulnerability the way small business owners, like herself, do.  For the small business owner, being open and authentic means you can get hurt, and this is something that small business owners need to keep in mind.

Naomi writes for an audience of really small businesses (hence “ittybiz”), and I write for slightly larger, small and medium-sized businesses, but I think the considerations are the same.  Even in a medium-sized business, if you’re really being authentic, you’re opening yourself up as a person, and that means that you’re opening yourself up to people taking stabs at you.  It’s bad enough when you’re a SMB and someone takes jabs at your product, that already feels personal.  But to take it one step further, and be truly authentic, and have people taking jabs at you as a person, takes a willingness to get hurt.

Connections

We should be transparent and authentic because that’s what people want from us, but when you’re transparent and authentic with thousands of people, you’re just asking to get slapped around.  But weh have to be authentic, and if we want to be successful, we need the numbers right? Even Naomi, in a recent post, talked about numbers being social proof.  Her argument is that as much as we would like to not care about numbers, whether we like it or not, they’re going to be used to measure our worth as experts, consultants, businesses, people.

We need the numbers, and we need the authenticity.  If we have both, we are eventually going to get beat up on, or as Chris put it in that first tweet, we’re going to offend someone.

So, what’s the answer?  Should we be slightly less authentic?  Should we give up on chasing the numbers in favour of protecting our fragile egos?

This is usually the part when you’re reading an article where the writer exclaims, “Neither!” and gives you some anti-climactic compromise between the two that will solve all your problems and allow you to have your cake and eat it too.  Sorry, not going to happen.  Instead, I’m going to tell you that you should do both.  Be less authentic, and forget about your number of followers, and you’ll be happier, and more successful.

The Problem With Counting Followers

I’m going to go ahead and do something that someone else should have done a long time ago (and maybe they have, but it just got lost in all the spam).  Remember all those products that I mentioned that teach you how to become a Twitter Super-Duper-Sexy-Guru-Rock Star, and get thousands of followers?  Well, I’m going to tell you what’s in those products, and how you too, can get thousands of followers, and I’m going to do it for free.

I am going to use Twitter as an example, but the same can be done with any social media platform. Ready?

Step 1. Create a Twitter account. Use your real name and a photo of yourself as an avatar. That makes you seem credible.

Step 2. Tweet interesting or useful links, primarily about the niche or industry where you want to develop your following.

Step 3. Use a directory like wefollow.com or Twitter Search to find people who are interested in your niche or industry, and follow them.

Step 4. Wait a couple of days. Most of the people you’ve followed will probably follow you back, either as a courtesy, or because you’ve been tweeting interesting/useful stuff.

Step 5. Use friendorfollow.com, or a similar service, to see who you followed that didn’t follow you back and unfollow them. When your following to follower ratio is too high, you look like a spammer.

Step 6. Intersperse some self-promotional tweets in with your other interesting/useful tweets, but always post at least 8 non-promotional tweets for every promotional tweet.

Step 7. Repeat steps 3 through 6, ad infinitum.

BONUS: Use a list like the Top-500-All-Follow-Back list.

Tada.  There you have it.  If you do this, even for just a couple of weeks, you’ll easily gain thousands of followers.  This information is not hard to figure out.  In fact, it’s obvious, and yet people are charging $100+ for it.

So, if this is so easy, and I know how to do it, why at time of this writing, do I not have over a thousand followers?  Because doing this misses the point!

Numbers are important, but the only thing I remember from my introductory quantitative methods class is this: numbers can be misleading.

The problem with focusing on the number of followers you have is that it’s not the right number to focus on.  Instead, you should focus on the total number of connections you have made – the total number of real relationships you have.

A few years ago, I got a Facebook friend request from a girl that I didn’t recognize.  Since my Facebook rule of thumb is that I will only friend someone that I actually know, I decided to check her out before accepting the request.  The first thing I noticed was that she wasn’t one of those spam accounts because her photo was too real (read: she didn’t look like a pin-up).  The second thing I noticed was that she had over 2,000 Facebook friends.  At the time, that was the most number of friends I had seen anyone have.  The third thing I noticed was that we had about 50 friends in common.  The fourth thing I noticed was that she had apparently gone to college with me.  I did not go to a big college. At this point, I was mildly perturbed.  All signs pointed to me knowing this girl, and yet I had no idea who she was.  So, I did what any normally obsessive compulsive would do, and I called a few friends of mine that we apparently had in common.

The result of my investigation was that I, in fact, did go to school with this girl, but didn’t really know her because she was a social shut-in.  She had no friends in school, but seemed to collect them on Facebook.  None of our “mutual” friends really knew her, they had just mechanically accepted the friend request when it came their way.  Aside from feeling sorry for the girl, I couldn’t help but feel like, she too, was missing the point.  She wasn’t using social media as a method of staying connected, or making new connections, she was just collecting “friends.”

Fast forward a few years, and that’s what people are doing with followers:  collecting them.  Well, guess what?  Collecting followers is not going to do anything to help your business, or your personal brand.

Coming to the Point

Social media is about networking and making connections.  Instead of focusing on accumulating tons of followers, you should focus on connecting with the ones you have.  Connections are important, because they’re the real value in social media.  People you connect with are the ones that ultimately end up being part of your tribe.  They are the ones who will introduce you to new opportunities.  Having tens of thousands of followers, and no connections is akin to walking into a conference, saying, “Hi my name’s Bob” to everyone and then leaving.  If you don’t delve further into that relationship, the introduction by itself is meaningless.

I don’t have a ton of followers on Twitter, a ton of friends on Facebook, or any other big number, but the people that I’ve met and connected with are more valuable to me than any random 10,000 followers.

I’ve been asked what my policy for following people back on Twitter is, because I do follow back a lot of people, but not everyone.  I follow people back who appear interesting, and who I can tell are interested in connecting. If your twitter stream doesn’t have a single @ in it, there’s a very small chance I’ll follow you.

The other reason that you should focus on making a few deep connections rather than simply trying to amass thousands of followers is that that’s just how humans are built.  Dunbar’s number theorizes that humans can really only process about 150 real relationships at any given time.  That means that once you’ve reached capacity, in order to make room for a new connection, you need to kick someone else out of your social circle.

This is where being less authentic comes in.  If you know that you can really only have 150 real relationships, shouldn’t you save your authenticity for those 150 individuals?  Maybe it’s time to be a little less candid with your 2,367 Twitter followers.  Instead, save your authenticity and your transparency for your real connections.

As Seth Godin is so fond of saying, if you find a few fiercely loyal connections, those people, those members of your tribe, will promote you to their friends, and thus begins that most sought after occurrence in business, the wave of word-of-mouth marketing.

Stop focusing on the number that gets displayed on the welcome page of your social network of choice, and start instead focusing on the number of real connections you’ve made.  Take the conversation beyond social media. Many of the connections I’ve made have started with a blog post, a comment, a tweet or a status update, and led to non-social media communication like e-mail, IM, or on a few occasions, actual phone calls. This is the place to get authentic. It’s where it matters, and it’s where it counts.

The biggest problem with accumulating tons of followers is that, usually, that’s where it ends.  Getting the follower is not the end, it’s the beginning. Now that you have that follower, it’s time for you to interact with him or her, and create a connection.  This simply can’t be done with thousands and thousands of followers.

The point is this: It’s about the people, not the media.

What do you think? Is it actually possible to connect with tens of thousands of people in an effective way? Is the social proof of big numbers more important than making the real connections? Is saving your authenticity for your real connections actually just being a wimp? Talk it out in the comments.