By Steve Baldwin | September 3, 2013
Many of us begin our social media existences with a great burst of activity. We link aggressively from our web sites, post frequent messages, and follow or like people in order to be followed or liked back. If we work hard, scour the web, post meaningful content frequently, and obey all the rules for building a social media audience, we will most likely be rewarded with an audience that can serve as an amplifier for our brand messaging.
At some point, however — and it might take weeks, months, or years to reach this point, we become aware that there are problems with the audience we’ve built and that something must be done about it.
One frequently reported problem pertains to the fact that people who most easily follow us back are often professional (or quasi-professional) social media marketers. I am aware of no studies listing the number of such people on Twitter, Facebook, et al, but they appear to be legion. What’s great about these people is that they can easily be coaxed into following you, allowing you to build your audience rapidly. The bad thing about them is that they really don’t have much to say, aren’t really interested in you, aren’t in-market for your products and services, and their main contribution to your social media outpost is to choke up your feed with messages that are irrelevant — and annoying — to those who actually are possible prospects.
If you are as unhappy with your social media audience as I was, you probably realize that there’s only one solution: you’ve got to get rid of these people. You must unfriend, unfollow, and otherwise cut them loose from your network. It might seem cruel to say this but their irrelevant, unwanted, annoying presence is holding you back, and you – the master of your social media outpost – are the only one who can do this.
While the idea of deliberately reducing the size of your social media audience might seem heretical to some — especially to those for whom metrics rule over every other consideration, you must consider doing so if you ever hope to improve your audience. The social media industry is so biased toward accumulation, aggregation, and increase that we tend to forget that quality is a far more important (albeit unmeasurable) factor than quantity.
As an experiment, I recently decided to reduce my Facebook “friends” from roughly 1,000 to approximately 500. Once I began this task, I noticed an interesting thing — not only did I not know most of these people in any meaningful way, but many of them were completely unrecognizable to me. This was my own fault — in my desperation to build my friend list (and appear more “influential”) I had basically answered each and every friend request that came my way. And I don’t think my behavior was atypical — in fact I think this is the way that far too many people behave on social media. Furthermore, the fact that I had done this revealed an unhealthy view of social media that I realized that I had been practicing for years — the idea that I was just using my friends — or my friends list — to boost my own prestige.
Once I liberated myself from this acquisitive mindset, and purged the roughly 500 friends who were neither friends nor meaningful associates, I began to enjoy my social media experience much more. Facebook and Twitter didn’t make my “unfriending / unfollowing” experiment easy (after all, their incentive is to build the social graph, not take it apart), so I had to resort to 3rd party apps. But now my news feed is easier to read, posts do not scroll as quickly, and the content is far more relevant to me. For the first time ever, I have some rough idea of who my social media audience actually consists of. Furthermore, for the first time I can actually appreciate what my actual friends have to say, because their posts aren’t pushed down by irrelevant interlopers.
Finally, I have freed myself from the grasping mindset which holds that “more is always better.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite – on social media, less is often more — a lot more.
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