Stop Crying About Followers Already

Let’s face it: social media is about our own personal or corporate egos.

A couple of days ago @nickleung asked me:

Since you’re an online expert, do you have any advice on how I can build a community for FeedbackJar.com?

I immediately answered: Interactive Feedback. That means listening and talking in a two-way channel.

I had recently come across this article by Dan Martell where he talks about how feedback is “the secret weapon for startups”. The truth is it’s not only for startups and it’s not a secret.

He gives five recommendations to enable a feedback loop. The last one is the most important: “Listening Online”.

But it’s not just listening. It’s participating.

You see, people won’t follow you on Twitter, or register on your site, or “like” your comments on FriendFeed, if you don’t follow them first and really, really listen to them. That includes helping them, reacting to things they say, offering help on things that are not related to your immediate goals and caring about their problems.

I want to give an example of someone who’s doing this right: Bruce Lewis. He’s the founder of photo startup OurDoings. He knows that he could probably buy thousands of dollars in Google Adwords and market the hell out of his startup. But he’s chosen to do what he does now, which is go to the places where his potential users are (FriendFeed, Twitter) and start a conversation with them; not pushing his product, but just trying to fit within the community and hear what they talk about.

People still ask in forums, Twitter and FriendFeed: “I wonder how many people are following me?” or “How can I get more followers?” or “I wonder how many people read my stuff?”. The moment you make it about you, you start with the wrong foot. Ask yourself “Who am I following and interacting with?”. It makes no sense to follow 10,000 people and not interact with 10 of them.

And by the way, great content alone doesn’t mean lots of followers.

Another great example of interactive feedback is Mr. Social Media himself: Robert Scoble. He has 100,000 followers, but I can tell you from my own experience with him that he’s very attent to listening — really listening — his followers and interacting with most of them. People feel special around him because of what he does.

Carmen Villadar tweeted today:

Dear Marketers w/ your bots. Ur better off hiring a dedicated Social Media person 2 genuinely engage. If not, U guys are naïve. :-)

I couldn’t have said it better. Using bots, scripts and other automated ways to let people know you’re listening to them will only backfire, so be careful.

How do you find people that are potential customers? Depends on your service, but I would create keywords to monitor social media using some of the following services:

• TweetBeep
• Twitter search RSS feeds
• FriendFeed search
• Google Alerts

Then output all these RSS feeds on a reader and be ready to listen and interact.

For example, for my Blovel Spot writing application, I set up keywords related to writing, like “writing novel”, “procrastinating novel”, “writing fiction”, and then monitored who was talking about this. I then followed these people and started listening to their needs and their life stories and have created an amazing community of writers that know me and are happy to interact with me. I have gotten more users to register on my application than doing any of the shady robotic stuff or spending a dime on Adwords or other online ads.

Of course, the process might feel daunting at the beginning. But soon enough you will have amassed a loyal group of fans that will be happy interacting and enriching your business and your career.

Bonus: Read this very interesting conversation that was sparked today and try to recognize what’s wrong with that question. Also, read a very interesting supplemental view by Valeria Maltoni.

Illustration by Addrox