The more people you follow on social media, the more people follow you back, right?
Mathematically, it may be right.
From a marketing perspective, wrong.
Even if everyone you followed did follow you back, that doesn’t mean they are the right people to follow.
A marketing expert on Twitter recently tweeted “don’t make it a goal to appeal to everyone online.” Great advice! It’s more effective to appeal to those who are truly interested in your topic.
A couple hours later, though, they tweeted “follow random people . . . there’s a chance they may follow you back . . . you may sell them something later”.
I disagree. Don’t just follow anybody hoping they’ll follow back. Even if they do, they’ll probably unfollow you when they realize your tweets aren’t relevant to them after all.
And the goal of following people on social media should never be to “sell them something later”. The goal is to Be Social and Get Noticed. If your followers get real value from your messages, they’ll know how to find your book, product or services to buy.
That’s why we are very selective about who we follow on our client’s behalf. We look for people to follow who show an interest in our client’s topics. We do this in two main ways:
- We review the bio/description to see if they have an interest in that topic.
- We review their tweets to see if they are tweeting about that topic and using related hashtags.
It’s much better to have fewer, but relevant and engaged followers. We help our clients with engagement by:
- Checking notifications to see who is engaging with and messaging a client, and responding as needed
- Retweeting relevant content from Twitter lists we’ve helped create for a client
- Sending thank you tweets to selected followers who retweet a client’s tweets
Don’t follow everyone, or just anyone – only those who want to follow you! Want to know how we can help with that? Just ask.