There are shady marketers who offer to give you friends on social media for a price. They produce the numbers, but they’re doing a disservice.
The numbers usually come from botnets that create thousands of accounts to follow people. In some cases they’ll even pay real people to follow you.
And it might look great and feel great, but it’s all an illusion. Numbers are worthless. Numbers don’t click your links, buy your products, or tell their friends about your services. They sit there, taunting you, telling you you’re important.
They know they’re lying. The people who sell the numbers know they’re lying. Now you know they’re lying and won’t deal with them. But you still want to know why your real followers aren’t talking to you.
Most of those people idly added you when they saw a post or two they found interesting. Very few of them show up again on their own.
You’re probably like I was not too long ago. You do get clicks, comments, and all those wonderful things, but not often, and it fizzles out fast. The content you post is probably fine, but most people never see it.
Here’s the problem: you’re not the only person vying for their attention. They have tens to thousands of people blasting content out.
It seems hopeless when you think of it that way. How do you, some random Internet person, get noticed? You won’t be seen by most people on the first pass, but more will see it if you post things people want to share.
This is something I’m still learning, but I’ll share what I know. I post a lot of comments and links related to technology, and most go unseen.
The few that do get seen have some shares, +1s, and comments. Those comments tell Google Plus that I posted something interesting, and it starts giving it higher weight in the streams of those thousands of previously disengaged people.
Now you can see where most people get hung up. They drop links and comments and hope for the best, never giving proper consideration to stickiness. Stickiness is how likely something is to stick to an eyeball as the something zips by an individual’s stream.
But even with your troubles, some people do engage. Take these little successes, learn from them, and use them for the next link or comment. Figure out why someone shared this link and not that link.
The same goes for +1s and comments. And you’ll get better at it with every post, turning more numbers into people who are interested in what you’re saying.
This is what I was talking about in my post on social media influence. You earn influence by learning how to engage more people with the things you say and do. And it’s why you should forget about numbers.
The numbers become viewers, clickers, readers, and circlers when you get better at engaging them. It’ll be different depending on your audience. Tech people like a lot of links to interesting tech things, so I post a lot of links.
Someone who talks about quilting might share photos of quilts from around the web. You need to do the things that get engagement, whatever those things are.
It’s up to you to figure that one out.
