A few people have been tweeting me and said things like, not auto-following them is not the way for a social media consultant to act in social media - you are ignoring people. Take a look at my recent post Why I Don't Autofollow You on Twitter to find out why.
Some others have said that they have followed my lead and it has only resulted in one thing... losing followers. And that is no way for a social media consultant to train people... people want to grow their accounts not shrink them.
My response to this... "Great! They are the ones that are not interested in you or what you have to say, so the way that your account is now going to grow is all about how you put content out and how you interact with others."
Take a look at my stats
(Stats from TwitterCounter.com)
With the auto follow from SocialOomph.com switched on this is how my account was growing.
Now... really, I was pleased that I wasn't staying still and my account was growing - I was gaining more followers. But then something twigged. Was I a victim to follow fraud as I had a few followers myself? I decided to switch it off as I was seeing that many people who were following me, resulting in me automatically following them back, were not engaging with me and I was not with them.
Look at the last week... since turning this auto follow off.
Ahhhhhh! I lost followers! Yes... A drop.
But because of a great post about entitled Secure Your Social Media Real Estate on Friday getting over 200 unique views and a mention on my friends blog Nigel Morgan, I can see that my web stats show a good proportion of referrals from these two pages on Friday, resulting in the increase on the 24th.
This was about providing content of value... people liked it... took the recommendation... and were interested in listening to me... not just following.
The way to understand things now if people are following my lead on Twitter and stopping the auto follow party is that now you will:
1 - gain listeners not followers
2 - build an authentic list of listeners
3 - be doing something right if your follower numbers grow
It's time for social media to get real and be authentic. It's time for it to grow up, and for the users of it to grow up too.
Your thoughts? Add your comment below
