The news that @barackobama has apparently hemorrhaged 35,00 followers in the past few days has set the social media world sniggering with schadenfreude.
These were the followers who presumably didn't appreciate being spammed with 113 tweets in the space of a few hours, exhorting them to tweet-lobby (twobby?) their local reps in Obama's support. This newsbyte, added to my own pathetic happiness when @emoderation reached a small following milepost last week, made me think a bit about what you have to do to get unfollowed - and if it matters how many followers you have anyway?
There is, as you'd expect, a lot of good advice on the subject ...
What makes people stop following you?
1. Quality and quantity: ExactTarget and CoTweet put out a report titled
The Social Break-Up earlier this year: recommended reading (as is 2010's
Twitter X-Factors ), it's very interesting for its analysis of what makes a follower turn off. In digest (and unsurprisingly) it is this: too much and too often of the wrong sort of tweets. When asked why they stopped following, the respondents top reason (52%) was that the content becomes repetitive or boring. Perhaps community managers are going to have to think harder to come up with good content for their accounts ...
Brands are criticised for either spamming with marketing messages or being too chatty. Spamming is generally acknowledged as a really bad idea - though you can get away with being prolific if what you are saying is relevant to your audience. A mixture of content and conversation seems to be the most appealing, with (if you're that kind of brand) a bunch of promotions thrown in as bribes every so often. Careful with those incentives though - you're likely to be unfollowed again right afterwards: the Twitter equivalent of a one-night stand.
Live tweeting at events (as I frequently do) is a problem. For those following the event remotely, or watching the tweetriver slide past on the wall, this is all very well. But even properly hashtagged, it's not much fun for the rest of your audience, and it's a problem I've been mulling over for a while. I've heard of tools such as
Proxlet, which allow followers to gag a Twitter account or a hashtag for a defined time; the ideal solution to just clamp your hand over the mouth of someone who you don't actually want to silence forever. Has anyone got any experience of these?
2.
You made a Twitter Gaffe : From
The Redner Group's PR mistweet for 2K Games to
Entenmann's #notguilty faux pas , it seems like every week there's a new Twitter gaffe making us Glad It Wasn't Us. Sometimes of course, you may get more people watching your tweets and hoping for repeat blunders, like tricoteuse at the guillotine. You're unlikely to make friends with them however, unless you do some very
adroit salvage work.
3. You've got a real world problem. Your Twitter account is going to reflect - very quickly - whatever is going on with your business offline. Sometimes the news actually breaks on Twitter (see
Urban Outfitters, who lost followers and gained a lot of negative PR when when they were accused of design theft, and Miley Cyrus shared the story to her 1m+ followers.) and other times the Twitterati pick it up from other channels and spread it as rapidly as only they can, like when the TSA forced a wheelchair-bound
nonogenarian to remove her incontinence protection whilst going through security. Justin Bieber even lost 80,000 followers after he cut his hair. Enough said.
4. You lose your best Tweeter. It's a problem, as the
BBC recently found out, when a reporter with 60K followers and a BBC branded account was hired by ITV and took her Twitter followers with her, onto her renamed account. The BBC
do have excellent social media principles, but they just weren't tight enough: it wasn’t written into her contract that the account was in any way linked to the BBC or that they controlled it.
5. You've been rumbled on the auto- thing. Honestly, although I know some perfectly good social media folk who do it, I find auto responses: "
Thanks for the follow! Visit us at our Facebook page" insincere and offputting. You can automate a lot of stuff in Twitter (see more below on this), including scheduling updates. I personally think these are fine as long as the human is still at the controls - I might schedule a tweet publicising a blog post to go out to the US audience after I've logged off for the day perhaps - but as
Outspoken Media points out, they can really backfire. When the world learned about Osama bin Laden’s death from the President, many big brands—like Lady Gaga—had scheduled tweets go live, to
unintentional comic effect. Another unfortunate deployment of a scheduled tweet? The PATH train’s
Mother’s Day well-wishes that went live about an hour after one of its trains had crashed and injured over 30 passengers.
As
Gregory Shumchenia explains in his post on Socialmouths, Twitter automation really goes against the grain of the whole idea of Twitter, which is to build relationships. When ExactTarget asked consumers last year why they followed brands, 20% of them said it was to interact (e.g., share ideas, provide feedback). I'm willing to bet a fair number are following to ask questions and make complaints and experience the heady thrill of a personal reply. However, by using automation what your customers will understand is that you’re only interested in talking
at them and that their opinions, complaints, questions, or feedback don’t matter to you.
For a really drastic case of misusing auto-tools, look at the
UCC coffee brand in Japan, who used an program so that, if someone tweeted keywords like “coffee” or “contest”, UCC would immediately send an @Reply to each user with a preset advertisement tweet related to their contest. Understandably, these Twitter users in the spam sniperfire were quick to complain and the campaign was halted after two hours, with a big apology on UCC's website.
This next bit is important; please read this
old but relevant article on the rules of Twitter. It gives you some really important info on how your account may be restricted if you repeat tweets, abuse trending topics, overuse auto- software. If anyone has a more up-to-date version, could you let me know?
Does it matter how many followers you have?
I feel just a tiny bit self-conscious here, protesting that size doesn't matter ... I don't have the biggest following in the world it's true, but they're most of them very interesting folk who share my interest in social media and might, in theory at least, be interested in what I say. I know this for a fact, because I'm
selective about who I follow back: I look at their profiles and posts, and I currently follow only half the number of people who follow me.
It really is all about quality and not quantity, hard though it might be for a community manager to convince a client who is concerned only with high numbers of followers. If your followers are mostly picked up via a dubious automatic following tool, they are not going to be in your target market, they are not going to be influenced by your tweets, engaged by your content, or RT-ing you to their followers. They are, as Farida Waquar says in her
excellent post on Brafton.com, indeed likely to be spam accounts themselves. Going back to Obama, it has been pointed out that a) if a follower wasn't prepared to 'twobby' their rep then perhaps they wasn't so valuable to the administration anyway, and b) in fact, the fuss over the loss has gained the campaign more 'buzz' than it would otherwise have had: @BarackObama's klout score has actually risen as a consequence of the mass un-follow.
Aside from issues of content, Farida's advice is:
to grow a targeted Twitter following, you should follow the right people yourself. Do this by:
- Searching for Twitter lists related to your target market and follow the people in them (and remember that being on lists is a good indication of how relevant your followers are finding your content)
- Looking for people you already know in your target market and see the lists they’re on, and follow accordingly.
- Using Twitter directories can also help target the people and groups you want.
Get rid of the chaff. You can clean up your followers by finding out who is active (via tools like
Twerpscan and blocking those who have tumbleweed blowing across their accounts.
Twitblock allows you to see who may be tweeting but is spamming or a bot, and block them too. If you want to clean up the list of those
you follow, then try
ManageTwitter. And find out who may be a
'fauxlower' - one who follows so many people that they could not possibly begin to read their tweets (BarrackObama follows 696,000 for example).
Cleaning up your act is actually not just an act of compulsive tidiness. As Farida
says:
The quality of your followers really is important because Twitter authority impacts SEO rankings. Google discredits companies that have spam-like followers and gives recognition to companies that appear as authorities in their industries, with followers serving as a signal. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has explained that Twitter accounts are assigned a score by Google. Authoritative Twitter users get a better score. Then, if other highly ranked users link to your site, this can affect your score and ultimately, ranking on Google. Also, people in your target market are more likely to retweet your articles if you’re marked as an authority by fellow users. If the search engine understands your Twitter content is a trusted source of information, Google has said this can impact where a web page falls in rankings.
So there you have it. Less is more
, most of the time.
Any more advice, disagreements, good tools - please comment below or why not talk to me at @emoderation? I promise to talk back.
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