I was perusing through my Twitter stream and noticed a couple of resolutions that involved increasing Twitter follower counts.
Of course, it looks impressive to have a bunch of followers, but shouldn’t the real goal be to get more conversions, responses, clicks, etc. from your followers and connect with them?
I remember when I first joined Twitter, I was real impressed with people who had followers with 5 digits or more. As I started gaining more followers myself, I began to realize the low percentage of people who actually clicked or interacted with my tweets.
Of course there are things you can do to improve those statistics. For example, posing questions to your followers is a great way to engage them. Also, throwing a fun/personal tweet in from time to time will also help showcase your personality.
Nevertheless, I still think people get too caught up in the numbers of friends, followers, subscribers, etc. in general. There’s nothing wrong with setting goals like this, but also follow up with goals regarding conversions and engagement.
You could have 50,000 Twitter followers, but how valuable are they if they don’t engage in discussions, respond to your tweets, or buy products (if selling is your goal)?
What do you think? Are we too obsessed with our follower counts? Also, what do you do to engage your followers? After all, that’s really the whole point of using Twitter. It’s not a popularity contest.
I joined Twitter to helpmake connections with other people in my field. I normally try to engage with other people and try to make normal conversations, but there are days when I get obsessed with my follower count, especially when there are times when I end up losing 2-4 followers every day. I doesn’t bother me when I lose a spammer who followed me just so I could follow them, but when I loose someone who followed me in my creative field, or even someone that I have conversations with and even start to consider a good acquaintance, I constantly get obsessed and keep asking myself “What am I doing wrong?”
I only follow people who are amusing, interesting or are likely to have a good conversation at heart with you. One of the issues being we should spend a certain amount of time in looking to grow targeted numbers and promoting products or services using the numbers we already have, test the water if you like. But this is a huge fallacy.
Hi Lisa you are right targeted traffic is the best and that is why I do not use so many bookmarking sites as i used to they help from a SEO point but if Google decides that they will no longer count bookmarking sites then your website/blog will get slapped, content is key right
Very nice and good… 🙂
Im always trying to get more twitter followers! My twitter handle is @onesourcer : )
I am new with Twitter and really find it hard to keep up. I’d rather have 20 great, active followers than 1,000 spambots on Twitter. I do not know. Looking at my statistics and traffic, very few of my clicks come from Twitter.
It’s an interesting case study, I’ve been considering moving into CPA and I guess this teaches us that the normal rules of ROI cannot be taken for granted if this is anything to go on
I am new with Twitter and really find it hard to keep up. More than followers I find it really hard to keep up with the tweets of all those I am following. The timings differ and everyone is tweeting all the time so it gets a bit tough. As for the followers, a little bump up wouldn’t do any harm!
I opened this blog post for the answer. But you also left for the comments. I have lot of followers. But how much it works? I do not know.
So right! You should always try to build very targeted following! Conversion would be very good in that case.
best tips ever…tweeter is one of the best that drive more traffic to site..
One thing that concerns me about Twitter is the conversion. Many people say that traffic from twitter and other social networking sites do not convert well.