Who needs followers?

I’m tired of listening to people in the social media sphere banging on about getting loads of followers and how important it is. For the most part it isn’t important at all.

Simply having followers means nothing if they’re not listening to you, means even less if you don’t add value for them to encourage their continued listening and is pointless if you can’t get them to do anything even if they are listening!

So, if simply having followers isn’t enough, what is?

LISTENERS of course.

Perhaps a better metric for how valuable your twitter followers are to you would be to see how valuable you are to them! Why not measure what kind of response you get when you ask them to do something! So, when you write a blog entry and suggest that your followers go and read it, include a unique trackable url and see how many actually do. If regularly only 2 or 3 of your 100 followers bother to click the link then you have a 3% response rate – let’s be honest, you can get a similar level of action by buying an email list and spamming people, so you might as well do that and save yourself a whole load of effort!

If you’ve recruited followers that actually want to hear what it is you say then including a link should be like asking your friends to do something…they’ll do it. You should be getting a response rate of very much higher than the spam level.

So the question is “how do I build a following that’s actually listening to me?”. Perhaps you should try listening the them first. When the people you’re following say something good, tell them and retweet it. If they ask a question, answer and have a look at the interesting people that they follow and who follow them.

Once you start to have a few connections gradually the word about what you do and say will spread – but you MUST remember that people will spread you when they’re ready, not when you are. To put it simply, you need to say stuff which is worth listening to, you need to say it regularly enough that followers remember who you are but not so regularly that you’re spamming them, and most importantly you must remember that this is SOCIAL media not SELLING media – don’t just use it to advertise yourself, because you wouldn’t like that would you?

There is no fast track to growing a following who listens – but then there’s no such thing as a free lunch either.