To buy or not to buy followers? That was the question last night that became the topic of debate. In a room full of people whose income depends on fans and followers, the question is do you buy or not buy followers. Since several others have regular businesses, they too were interested.
When YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were first seen as legitimate marketing tools to stay connected to customers, big media bought in, and bought in big. Within a very short period of time small overseas companies and automated systems created millions of profiles online so they could sell “fans”, “likes” and followers to these eager buyers.
The theory was if a music video had a lot of fans right away others would not want to be left out and tell their friends to like it too. In marketing this is using the “fear of loss” method. Fear of loss can be triggered with things as simple as the appearance of losing cool points for not liking a popular band quick enough. My niece is a case study in teenage markets.
Today every business is trying to get that edge on the other business. Sadly this is taking the focus away from what the celebrity or business owner should be looking at. Simply put they are ignoring the customer to get customers. If you buy followers it doesn’t help.
So how do you get “followers” quickly when you create new and great content? That is the job of “the list”. That mystery business secret that you really need to learn how to crack if you want followers that grow your business instead of followers you pay for.
Many times when you see people who are concerned with “followers” and “friends” and “likes”, you see someone with some other big insecurity. Buying followers won’t fix it, and if you are discovered, you might get called out on it.
At the end of the day, why do you even want “followers”? Does buying them fill that insecurity? For a twelve year old, it can be a competition simply to see who has the most fans or likes. For adults, the last competition was won by Ashton Kutcher, and the game is over.
You want followers to build your business and generate income. Nothing more. If you blog, you want more real followers to click on ads on your page to make you money. Fake followers don’t click. If you are a writer, you want followers to buy your books, bought followers don’t buy books.
Do you see where I am going with this? For SEO purposes some sites have a minimum number of connections before you can set your page name to something easy. If you aren’t spending a lot of money and time on Search Engine Optimization (that is what SEO stands for just in case you didn’t know), then you don’t need to ever buy followers unless you want to spend money to stroke your own ego. Just a tad narcissistic don’t you think?
My personal take is go deep, for the size of my business, a few hundred followers is just fine as long as the followers grow at a measly 10% per month or so.
10% a month might not sound like a lot, but remember the million dollar question. Would you rather have a million dollars today or one penny today that doubles daily for 30 days? The answer unless inflation is 100% of course is the penny. At the end of thirty days you will be far richer.
The same is true with followers. If you know who your market is, and what value you give them, you know why they value you, and what you should be feeding them.
Twitter is helping people make better decisions by adding “retweet” as a metric. 10,000 followers and no re-tweets? Either they are fake or nobody is listening at all. There’s your sign. Maybe twitter will put retweets right on your profile someday so everyone will know.
For kids taking that photobomb picture and getting 10,000 likes for the sake of likes might be cool. For your new restaurant, if not one of those likes ever comes in to buy a meal, then it was 5 minutes of your life wasted posting “stuff”.
Time is the one thing we can’t get back, so know what your customers wants from you and give it to them, they will bring you followers and you won’t have to buy them.
