Online Communities

I have read just about everywhere that with Twitter you should just follow everyone who seems even remotely interesting or has the potential to be interested in what you say. You should follow them, then use any of the various Twitter programs out there to unfollow those who don’t follow you within three days. I know I blog about social media a lot, but I can’t stress enough how futile blind following is. It’s like blind querying: Agents tell you not to blindly send out queries. They tell you to carefully select your markets and send letters to those. I feel Twitter, and any other social media, should be the same way. So I don’t blindly follow writers or readers on Twitter. I carefully consider them and their Tweets. If they don’t pose questions or interesting discussion and only spam links, what is the purpose of following them? They’re so wrapped up in their own link spamming that they’re not going to notice me.

Social media is about social interaction. If you find you are not interacting with your followers or your followers aren’t interacting with you, what is the point?

I see authors link spamming their e-books all the time on Twitter. I go to check out their Amazon rankings, only to find that their link spamming is not at all helping their sales. It’s because they’re not treating their followers as people. They’re treating them as commodities to buy their products, and thus killing the human element to this social media thing.

Yesterday I joined a community on Facebook of writers who post their author pages and receive likes in return. I received 36 likes from this page. My hope is that we’re all not simply liking to like but are going to actually interact with these pages that we liked. Or else what is the point if we’re just going to ignore these authors’ postings? I didn’t simply like to like. I liked authors’ pages who engaged well with the fan base and who had books I might be interested in checking out. It doesn’t do me a bit of good to have 85 likes but not a one of them pays attention to what I write. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have thousands of followers but no engagement from them.

So I don’t understand why social media moguls encourage follow spamming. I am very selective about who I follow. I primarily follow people now based on their websites–which mostly occurs from WordPress. I am wary about following people with an enormous follower base because these people usually interact so little with the followers I wonder why they even have a Twitter or a FB or any type of social media in the first place. These people may seem popular at first glance, but a look at their Amazon ranking begs otherwise.

I suppose follower spam is encouraged because you might get lucky and find lots of people who are suddenly interested in what you’re posting. But it’s not working for me to do that. I find those I interact with are interested in me far more than those I try to interact with but won’t interact with me in return.

I’m nearing the 300 follower mark after two months of blogging, followers I worked hard to get. At the same time, I am learning that it is not the amount of followers you have, in spite of what social media moguls will tell you. I believe it is the relationships you try to establish with each one. So, if you have 100 followers and talk to every one of them, then that is better than 1000 followers you don’t even acknowledge. Those are 100 followers who could potentially support you in your endeavors versus the 1000 followers who feel ignored and may choose not to support your endeavors because you don’t acknowledge them.

So I’m going to get down to the nitty gritty of what this post is about using my experiences so far in the social media world. I’ve only been back in social media for about two months, but I’m learning that it is so important to see your followers as more than just a number–you need to see them as people. You need to devote the time they devote to you, if you can. Even if you can’t go to their blogs, interact with them when they comment on your posts (and I will get to commenting on my last post. I promise). These are people you talk to, people you can form invaluable online relationships with, and not just for book promotions either. It just feels good to know others are taking the time out of their day to appreciate what you wrote. I can’t describe the feeling. I’m sure a lot of you know what I’m talking about. But please, don’t get followers for the sake of followers so you can expand your platform. Take the time to try and get to know who is following you. And even if you don’t want to follow that person back, at least recognize this person read your stuff. READ. YOUR. STUFF. This person could have chosen to read other stuff, but no. YOUR. STUFF.

I say don’t go after a number because you can have 10,000 followers but only 100 are ever commenting on your posts. So where are those 9900 other followers? What are they doing? Why do you even have them? I guess it’s great to have them should they happen to catch what you write, but I’ve always preferred quality over quantity. Quality seems to be working for me thus far.

There is also Twitter where people love to play the number’s game. I have 1,000 followers, most of who followed me. I do not follow for the sake of following. I generally wait until people follow me, and if I like their profile (meaning they’re not spamming), I will follow them back and engage in conversation. However, while I want to interact with all 1000 of my followers, some of them fall into the trap of link spamming. Now I will re-tweet ones I find engaging, but most are just plain irritating and I hate that that follower fell into that trap. They then start neglecting their followers in favor of trying to push their wares on us all. It does no good to have 2000 followers if 2000 of your followers aren’t checking you out because you’re link spamming. Social media is not like my part-time job, which is a number’s game. Social media is about interaction, recognizing people for who they are. At least, that’s what I think.

But I seriously appreciate all of you. Like, you have no idea. It never gets old to find out when someone has liked my post or commented on it. Never. I don’t think it ever will. I’ll admit I love being noticed. But I also love meeting new people and getting to know them and what they write. People are just awesome to me.