Twitter: musings on the value of social proof

Pomcat has recently been given some business from an online marketer we’re working with (David Endersby of The Best of Staines).  What David did is keep an eye on his Twitter universe, and spotted a person after a website.  He put the two of us in touch.  Simple as that.

This success suggested to me that I should start investigating this Twitter phenomenon more seriously.  I am involved in 3 businesses in this technology space, and maybe Twitter could be a more serious channel to market for each of them.

I also attended an event last night – a local meeting of the Entrepreneur’s Circle.  Interestingly, the person running the event, Mike Loughton, introduced us all, and mentioned a few people in the group who had the most Twitter and Facebook followers.  Intentionally or otherwise, it gave a little social proof to those people – somehow it was implied that they were doing something successful for their business.

Now, given that I’ve recently received business from Twitter, I can well believe it’s true.  If these people have organically built a loyal and interested following on Twitter and Facebook, their lists have great value to a business.

And let’s face it, who would want to follow someone who only has a couple of followers?  Can’t be that good then, can they?!  But in looking into this social media world, I’ve discovered that it’s actually very easy to add a very large number of followers to your accounts, which makes you seem like you’re really popular – the right sort of person to be following.

Building the numbers

I’ve been here before, for another business.  We worked with a person who will remain nameless, who said he would be able to generate business for one of our products through the use of Twitter.  I watched as he created a set of automated posts to spam out regurgitated generic news from our account.  He then spam-followed lots of people, and as if by magic we had 3000 followers!

But the interesting thing was, none of these followers was following us for our content (Why would they?  It was absolute rubbish!)  They were following us so that we’d follow them.  IE, they were trying to sell us something.

So, if we actually posted some interesting content, do you think they’d listen?  Probably not – that wasn’t why they were there.  If everyone is shouting, but we’re all wearing earplugs, how much business is done?

So how do you maximise your Twitter followers?

Well, if you think it necessary for your business to be given a little social-proof injection, I’ve given you one tactic above – spam, spam, spam.  It works.  If you’d like proof, here’s the account we used: https://twitter.com/#!/Fourhats.

Take a look at it on TwitterCounter.  Yes, it’s declining, but we’ve still got about 1.5k followers, and we haven’t posted a tweet for over a year now.

How might you do the same thing now, a year or two on, and without having to spam your twitter account with rubbish?  (Did you see how many posts we did?!) Well there are tools you can use now, to automate the entire process of acquiring followers, and it costs nothing to do.

Enter Twiends.  I’ve signed up for an account to give it a go, and in the space of an hour or so I’ve got about 20 new followers.  If you have a look at TwitterCounter for me in a day or so’s time, you’ll see the spike quite clearly.  Now I’m not going to continue with anything hardcore here, for both ethical and business reasons.

A number of the issues are spelled out clearly on this post by ViperChill (which I recommend generally as a good source of very interesting stuff in this space).  But he also gives clear instructions on how to automate the task of using Twiends, and has used it to add a quick 5k followers to his own account.

Conclusions

1. If you want lots of followers on Twitter or Facebook, it’s very easy and quick to achieve.
2. Lots of followers do not have anything to do with lots of business from Twitter – you need proper followers who are engaged with your brand for that.
3. Techniques of acquiring lots of followers may well get your twitter name and facebook page banned by the respective organisations – think carefully about the cost of that before you do go ahead and acquire thousands of followers.
4. Don’t believe everything you see on Twitter.  Just because they’ve got 5000 followers, doesn’t mean they are worth following.  Just because they only have 20 doesn’t mean they’re not worth following.  If you want to manipulate the numbers it’s all too easy.