Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012, as an opinion piece. The author’s 621 followers, his age (32) and the follow-back and retweet etiquette described reflect Twitter (now X) at that time.
I’m no social media expert (as my current 621 Twitter followers, few but genuine, probably show), but drawing on several sensible articles published online this week, we’re going to reach a few conclusions. As always, this is a personal point of view: some people will agree and others not so much.
Everyone on the internet is chasing relevance and popularity, because for bloggers and brands alike that translates into some kind of benefit. This pursuit has already produced a sort of rulebook on social networks, and even someone who knows nothing about social media can draw conclusions from the mathematical ratio between followers and accounts followed.
Being realistic, we could identify four types of situation, each with its corresponding initial prejudice:
- Blogger 1: Follows 600 accounts. Followed by 34 accounts = a loser.
- Blogger 2: Follows 20,400 accounts. Followed by 20,401 accounts = no merit, since he follows everyone.
- Blogger 3: Follows 700 accounts. Followed by 12,000 accounts = relevant and popular. Must be interesting.
- Blogger 4: Follows 100 accounts. Followed by 140,000 accounts = amazing, a “diva”, a star, an expert in the field.
That would be the initial prejudice, common and normal, because someone took it upon themselves to set the rules or devise strategies. In fact, there are excellent manuals on becoming “popular” on Twitter, and when you finish reading them, you’ll conclude that you’re being asked to act like a kind of Judas, because you’ll have to follow a strategy in which you’re no longer yourself.
On the dilemma of whether “influential” bloggers or brands should follow their followers back, I recommend reading an article by Grissel Montiel on Entreclick.com. She doesn’t have 200,000 followers on her Twitter account, but the explanation she gives brands is one of the most sensible things I’ve read online, and that’s enough.
Some bloggers follow a specific strategy: keeping a balance of following no more than one account for every 100 or 1,000 followers. That makes them popular and influential, at least for now and as long as their followers tolerate behaviour that in a way goes against the humility and the spirit in which Twitter was originally created. Part of Twitter’s success lay in being a platform of closeness, where followers could communicate with the people they followed. Frankly, a strategy like that is turning your back on your followers.
Others start out like Blogger No. 1 in the example, following everyone in an attempt to win followers. Once they’ve reached a reasonable number of followers, they start unfollowing their followers until they become Blogger No. 3. Four days ago they were “the loser”, and today they’re relevant and popular. This is the strategy followed by, among others, someone who works at a “well-known” publication. In my view, “you’ve really put your foot in it”.
Following criteria
Clearly you shouldn’t follow everyone, especially knowing that on Twitter there are accounts that talk about all sorts of subjects, others are spammers and others live solely obsessed with getting followers (I’ll never understand it). But going from there to having 140,000 followers and only being interested in 200 accounts, which happen to be accounts with a high number of followers… let’s just say that’s dividing Twitter into “social classes”.
My following criteria are very simple. By default I follow everyone, although I set myself a few reasonable rules to avoid future problems:
- I don’t follow accounts that haven’t published a single tweet yet.
- I don’t follow accounts that use automated systems to publish around 30 tweets a minute.
- I don’t follow accounts that always publish the same tweet (promoting a single product).
- And obviously, I don’t follow accounts that only talk about subjects that don’t interest me, such as football, motoring and so on, which doesn’t mean I’ll unfollow someone who at some point talks about a topic I’m not interested in.
Those are my specific criteria, because the truth is I’m not as single-minded as I may sometimes seem. Behind my account is a 32-year-old who sometimes also enjoys the “silly stuff” or jokes some people write, and the person you least expect can make you smile with their simplicity, far from the world of the “divas”, because life isn’t just business, economics and finance.
What are influence and relevance?
Another article, published by an outlet that isn’t hugely popular either, was Lupita Rivers’s piece on Curioseandito, which came with a chart from PuroMarketing.com for measuring your influence on Twitter. It also offered tips for gaining influence on Twitter.
In other words, if you are who you are, you’re not influential on Twitter, but if you follow the tips they give you (and therefore stop being who you are), you can become influential. In short, it’s like chatting up a girl by telling her you’re someone other than who you are and acting in a way you don’t really feel like acting. Congratulations, you’ve turned into a Judas to be more popular.
For my part, I’d sum up influence, relevance and popularity with a few examples. You’re popular when you tweet that you’re going to the bathroom or say goodnight and get 20 RTs. Those RTs are what we might call a full-blown “virtual fellatio” performed on a “diva”.
Not being popular is the exact opposite: tweeting something extremely important or valuable content and having Twitter users ignore it completely, even though if a “popular” user tweeted that same message it would be a guaranteed hit online. In fact, a while ago, when I was reading various tips on how to make your articles more successful online, several of the steps involved trying to get an influential person to tweet your message. To do that you had to win that influential person over, so once again “virtual fellatio” comes into play.
In short, to be more relevant on the internet you have to perform “virtual fellatio” on other relevant accounts, because if you have few followers, even if you write a masterpiece, it will hardly go viral.
This has consequences. To give one example, not long ago a relevant, popular person, an internet “diva”, justified the violence at the London protests. That was a blunder in every sense, yet thanks to the loyalty of their followers it had no further repercussions.
My advice for gaining popularity on Twitter isn’t valid, because I’d tell you to be yourself, to retweet only when the content is good rather than weighing up the popularity of whoever wrote it, to be original and not to pay much attention to tips on becoming more popular, because if climbing the popularity rankings means performing fellatio… that isn’t looked on kindly where I come from.
And my final piece of advice… don’t write articles like this one, because they tend not to go down well with certain people and you won’t gain popularity, just the odd enemy. But… that’s who I am: sincerity, honesty, humility and clarity come before fellatio 🙂
Featured image: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
