A great deal of internet marketing relies on social networking. Particularly in the past year or so, an online presence at social networking sites is considered a vital component in any company’s internet marketing plan. Getting other members to follow your posts is a key to making this work.
But what happens if you start Losing Followers? Well, for one, it means you are doing something wrong.
To Follow Or Not To Follow
Not only do you have Twitter followers and friends on MySpace and Facebook, but your blog can amass followers too. In fact, if you use the Blogger platform for your blog, there is a nifty widget you can install that shows icons of everyone following the posts. Click on the icon and you get retrieve the follower’s full Google profile. By the way, if you are not using this, you should – it’s a great way to establish a sense of community and increase your marketing list.
There are two main reasons that someone will choose to follow your posts. These are the law of reciprocity and simply finding informative and interesting topics. The first one refers to the tendency of one member of a social networking site to follow the other simply as a reciprocal gesture. The second simply means your posts were interesting enough to make a visitor want to return, often they will add an RSS feed to your blog. When this is the case, give yourself a pat on the back, you are doing something right!
The law of reciprocity does not always apply. There are many Twitter members who join merely to follow others and rarely post. They are unlikely to be followed just because they add your URL to their list. Other times, a social site member is clearly in the community purely to spam others or advertise their company ad endlessly. They are easy to spot by taking a quick glance at their posts.
Losing Followers
It can be rather difficult to figure out when you are Losing Followers unless you keep a sharp eye on your statistics. Do you know how many tweeps you have right now? If you don’t, then you can’t know when someone drops off the list. The same holds true for your blog. You have to stay on top of the numbers.
There are some online apps you can acquire that help you gather statistics. Twitterless is one that will give you a graph of the number of followers, show where they are located, and allow you to group them according to various properties, such as keywords in posts.
After you have determined that you are losing followers, now what? Examine the rate at which followers are dropping. Is there a pattern? Is it a steady decline?
Next, take a look at the posts right before the followers dropped off. Examine them with a critical eye. Is there something that others might construe as spam, a blatant advertisement, or be considered offensive? Maybe they are just uninteresting. Compare the posts preceding both periods of gaining and losing followers. What is the difference?
The lesson to be learned from this exercise is that all of your posts on a social networking site or blog need to keep a follower’s interest. Beware of political and religious topics that could offend someone and keep posts about what you ate for lunch to a minimum. Instead, offer information that is useful to your target market.
The longer you work at creating interesting posts, the more you will reduce your chances of Losing Followers and increase your chances of gaining new ones.
About Sean Rasmussen
Many twitter users are using it to spam their opportunity. Why not just link people to your blog with an informative article. Twitter is about learning who you are as a person.
Definitely lots of spamming going on at Twitter Phil. I totally agree with linking to blog articles that provide quality information, people can then make their own minds up whether or not to take action… if the article is about taking action of course.
Sean
The issue of spam on Twitter is a huge one. It is never ending.
Thanks for the tips on how to manage Twitter. I find the tools available to give a welcome message and unfollow unfollowers really handy so it doesn’t clutter my account up
Agreed. Some people/organisations seriously tweet the SAME message again and again. I really don’t see the benefit in doing this as it just becomes like an annoying ad – an ad that you can simply unfollow.
Losing followers would be pretty frustrating, especially when you’ve worked so hard to get them. Then again, there might be a time when you would purposely want to lose followers. Say, you want to take your business/blog in a new direction and you know, by doing that, it involves alienating some people. That could happen.
This is happening on FB a bit now. I’ve seen a couple of pro-bloggers purposely delete FB friends, in order to start afresh. One blogger in particular, put out a notice about it on Twitter explaining the reasons first, which I thought was polite.
Hi Sean,
Losing followers can be frustrating. I’ve lost a few here and there but not in large numbers at a time. I follow the majority of people who follow me and sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost followers because I haven’t followed someone back.
I try to stay away from anything that people are arguing about and I try not to post anything that will offend someone. I try to be polite always. I think it’s important to add value when you share content. I think it should be interesting and informative. It definitely helps if it’s funny.
I think you’ve got the right attitude there Jazz. You can only be true to yourself and polite. You can never please everyone. Although standing for something that may upset some people will build a stronger following that simply sitting on the fence.
I try to post interesting articles. I may lose a couple of followers here and there but I think that’s only normal when building a list. I haven’t noticed that I’m losing followers at all but if I did I would re-assess content I’m sharing as to not offend anyone.