Count Your Conversations, Not Your Followers

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook provide a deceptively simple metric of success: the number of friends or followers you have amassed. However one should never mistake an account with a huge number of followers for an account that actually impacts people. This is particularly true on Twitter, the 140 character messaging phenomenon, where an account doesn’t even necessarily represent a single person (in the walled-garden of Facebook it is a little more cut and dry). This is compounded by the fact that many opportunistic users use tools to automatically find and add followers on the fly. Try mentioning the word “marketing” in a Tweet and see how many accounts tied to marketing consultants instantly follow you. This is not real or useful social interaction, it’s just more spam.

Does the follower count matter? It does, but only as one piece of the puzzle. Unless they are a well known celebrity or tastemaker, a user who is followed by thousands of accounts and in turn follows thousands themselves is probably not a real person. Few human beings could sift through such a massive influx of messages. Ideally a person would be followed by many but only follow a select few. The list of accounts you yourself follow is public on Twitter, and it should be a resource for your audience. It provides an insight into who you find useful, interesting and important.

So what is a better metric for gauging your Twitter success? Try counting conversations. Count the number of people you reply to who actually reply back. Count the number of times your brand is mentioned by others. Count the number of useful links you pass on to your followers and how often they pass that information on themselves. If you find that you are unable to strike up conversations then perhaps that is a sign that you should reevaluate who you are trying to connect with. As with all business endeavours you should be setting clear measurable goals for yourself and working hard to meet them. Treat social networking the same way, just make sure your metrics are meaningful.

As a thought experiment, ask yourself if your posting habits on Twitter or Facebook would change if your follower count was hidden If all you had to go on was the conversations you participated in, how would you measure success? You would measure it by how many actual human beings you have impacted. That is how it works in real life, where there is no convenient list of friends, and that is how you should conduct yourself online. Nobody is impressed with your follower count but yourself.

…from a series of Social Media articles I’ve been contributing to the Business Link newspaper, with editions in Niagara, Hamilton-Halton and Brantford. This article ran in Volume 8, Issue 1, February 2010.

Photo Credit: "Conversation" by clarity. Licensed through Creative Commons 2.0