Social-media followers: Quantity or quality?
When I was in college, I worked at my school’s gym with a young woman we’ll call Zelda. We’d worked together for years, and I thought of her as a friend. The day my school was granted access to Facebook, back in that halcyon summer of 2004, Zelda excitedly asked me to become Facebook friends with her as soon as possible. I’ll admit, I was a little flattered that someone wanted to be Facebook buddies with me so badly.
When I finally set up my account later that day, I found she had already attracted close to 2,000 friends. She freely admitted to me later that she didn’t know most of them — and she didn’t want to. She was just competing to be the most virtually popular girl on campus. I still friended her, but I felt a little cheap afterward. I didn’t see the point in having all those connections that didn’t mean anything.
Flash forward to today: Social media has grown up in a lot of ways. It has become a broadcast channel, a marketing outlet and a haven for collaboration. It’s a much more mature, useful platform. But it’s still filled with the Zeldas of the world, all clamoring for attention. I’m not the only one annoyed by it either — some people go so far as to resort to mass unfollowing.
Gary Stein makes a great point about the futility of casual fans in his analysis of the Nickelback/pickle conundrum. We talk about the dangers of overexpansion in business all the time, but we never discuss the issue in a social-media context. If you build more stores than your supply chain can handle, the whole brand suffers. If you connect with millions of people and you don’t have the resources to actually establish a connection with them, you’re wasting your time, their time and whatever resources you’ve already thrown at the project.
What’s the solution? I don’t think you need to know every person you connect with via a social platform — but you should at least be interested in them and capable of adding a little something to their lives. You need to have the manpower to handle creating enough content to keep your followers engaged, both as a group and as individuals. If you’ve become so popular that you’re not able to really interact with your audience anymore, you’re growing too quickly. Shift your focus from expansion to shoring up your base, because engagement is a two-way street. Ignore your followers and you might end up with a list full of Zeldas.
Can you have too many social-media followers? Is quality of engagement more important than raw numbers? How can companies maintain a balance?
Image credit, Tanya len, via Shutterstock
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Tags: community, engagement, followers, social media
Categories: Editor's Take
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Posted by New FaceBook Group Follow Me Follow You on March 3rd, 2010 at 10:09 am
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Posted by @ehood - Erica Jones on March 3rd, 2010 at 6:38 pm
I truly think it depends on what is success to the client. Yes, as marketers, we should be making recommendations as to what is more important, but in the end, what makes them excited about social media and ready to adapt and evolve in the space each year.
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Posted by Trace Cohen on March 3rd, 2010 at 7:06 pm
It really depends on your goals. Social media is supposed to be used to make connections and relationships with someone you never would have been able to before. Sometimes it is a popularity contest, which is fine if that's how you want to look at it. For companies though, I feel like they want to amass the largest following because it shows power and dominance over competitors and will probably make the headlines for free PR.
If you use social media though, just make sure to add value to the conversation.
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Posted by Andrew McFarland on March 3rd, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Good questions. Lots of followers means your potential for deep relationships is higher. But quality relationships means you may get higher WOM advocacy.
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Posted by Mike Rowland on March 3rd, 2010 at 7:32 pm
We ran an experiment with an follower adder on Twitter and analyzed the results for adding large numbers of random (rather than targeted) followers using the key words "social media" and "online community." Despite following and then unfollowing hundreds of folks, we found minimal contacts that would be of interest or that we might have some influence with on our topics. Sad that people still don't get it… here's the link: http://bit.ly/aiCpPO
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Posted by @johnpanico on March 3rd, 2010 at 8:04 pm
People ask me that question all of the time. My answer is that you need both! Because quantity in some cases is going to overcome quality. If you deliver great content, then you may get noticed by someone who you didn't feel was a "quality fit". More importantly, you aren't sure of the friends/followers of those that fit into the quantity part of the equation. And you are going to get some spillover from that. Again, it starts with great content.__Finally, if all you are preaching to are the "quality" folks, isn't it kind of like singing to the choir? Your ability to seen and perceived as an authority may not be space in that same choir?
Posted by @johnpanico on March 3rd, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Jesse, you kind of got me wound up….sorry!
Trace's point is that many (and the argument can be made on both sides) that numbers show power and authority. When you looked at your friend and her 2,000 Facebook followers, you were impressed. You didn't think…."Hmmm….I wonder if they are quality followers!" Yes, we vote with our clicks and unfollowing is an option that people following us have as well.____Bottom line…if you aren't bringin' it, people aren't going to keep with you anyway!
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Posted by jstanchak on March 3rd, 2010 at 8:24 pm
John — I'm not saying numbers are totally irrelevant. Just that the principles of scalability apply to social media. If you get too big, too fast you running the risk of ending up with a large network that's impossible to mobilize. It's a balancing act, no question, but it's a challenge we have to take seriously if we really want to get the most out of our networks.
Posted by EmilyMolitor on March 3rd, 2010 at 9:05 pm
I agree with John that numbers make a big impact, but see Jesse's point about the ability to mobilize a smaller, more qualified network. This reminds me of another one of your posts, Jesse, where you discussed the value of those we follow and that follow us. I have many people that I am facebook friends with whose opinion I do not care about or, for that matter, trust against a stranger's. I agree with Trace, it depends on your goals.
Posted by Kevin Moreland on March 3rd, 2010 at 10:47 pm
There is no black or white absolute answer here. If you're a mass marketer with distribution far and wide then it would seem high numbers are important. Having high numbers doesn't mean that the engagement equation isn't important, it simply means you have more people and a bigger opportunity and therefore return on your efforts. In my experience its easier to get budget and senior management buy-in to spending on engagement mechanisms when you can sell the idea that you have 1,000,000 fans rather than 10,000.
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Posted by @jimmymac on March 3rd, 2010 at 7:02 pm
More than anything, social media is relationship marketing. being public relations tool may be a close second depending on the specifics. make it a popularity contest and you have results that are as shallow as, well, popularity contests.
Posted by Twitter Business Magic PLR | VC Web Marketing on March 3rd, 2010 at 10:09 pm
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Posted by David H Deans on March 4th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Jesse, given your description of Zelda I think she would be a perfect fit for the role of a typical account executive at an Ad agency or PR firm. She could "leverage" her acquired list of "friends" and send them regular unsolicited emails until they begged her to stop. Isn't that what shallow people schooled in the bygone era of mass-media do when they discover social media platforms?
Posted by Sharon Mostyn on March 4th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Your post brings up a great question, Jesse. My answer is that quality is more important, but sometimes quality is difficult to ascertain. As your article suggests, I only follow people who I feel might bring some information that is important to me, but who knows what will be important to me in a week, month, year, 5 years…so my follows may be a bit more diverse than what I'm currently interested in seeing. I think using lists, searches, hashtags, and programs like Tweetdeck or HootSuite allows me to follow more people and topic effectively.
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