Social Media Popularity Addiction and Why I Quit

Illicit Drugs Are Popular, But Still Illicit
Illicit Drugs Are Popular, But Still Illicit


I believe the popularity addiction that many people suffer from in social media is downright pathetic. I’m going to tell you, in plain business terms, why I quit putting that drug in my bloodstream and stopped caring about appearances of popularity, having a squillion followers, or stressing about having the highest Klout score. In short, it is because those things aren’t what pays the bills, and they can even be quite destructive pursuits.

If you will look at it rationally, for just a moment, I’ll show you why the fashionable illusion of popularity fails the test of real business value. If you are ready to breathe a sigh of relief, you may want to pay attention and join me on the road to recovery.

For the most part, you probably don’t follow people on Twitter or “Like” them on Facebook because you’re planning to do business with them. Sometimes, perhaps, but how often? Really, how often do you use that long list of people you are connected to as a reminder for your shopping list?

When you need to pick up something on your next shopping venture, you don’t go and see who you’re following to decide what to buy or who to buy from. No you don’t! OK, maybe you do … but if that’s the case, you are in a very small minority. If you buy from them, it is likely because they built a positive brand image, and became more memorable.

Then why is it that so many people out to sell something have it in their head that other people are using social media for formulating their shopping list? They aren’t thinking in rational human terms … that’s why! They are thinking in terms of appearances and what may make them look more important or popular, rather than building a sustainable brand recognition. I guess that must make sense to some people, but not the successful ones … not for the ones with two brain cells to rub together.

Let me explain it like this: If you saw only 426 people following Subway Restaurants on Twitter, it probably wouldn’t alter your thoughts about buying a Subway sandwich. You buy from them because they make an awesome sandwich, and you’ve heard of them because they built their brand based on those awesome sandwiches. That is also why they don’t have 426 Twitter followers … they have 184,847. They produced something people want, and they made it memorable.

Conversely, if you see that a small real estate firm has 184,847 Facebook fans, it doesn’t mean they’ve got a house you want … or that they will be any better at selling your house. In fact, it may mean they are playing the popularity game, and prioritizing poorly.

Upside Down Social Media Thinking
Upside Down Social Media Thinking
People often get this all mixed up and think the popularity is what creates success, while the opposite is true. It works the other way around … successful branding creates the popularity. If you try to fake it or shortcut it, you will only deceive yourself … and I can back it up with facts, figures, and common sense.

You can lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself. If you try lying to me, I’ll break out the real numbers. Try this on for size: Here is a recent snapshot of a random hundred people who followed me on Twitter, along with the results I put together from over 1,000 tweets of my previous ten blog articles. See “Twitter in Numbers: Marginal, Not Magical“. Click it and read up if you really want the truth.

Perhaps too many people latched onto the fallacy of “more is better”, or the crazy idea that social media marketing is just about the networking … but it’s not!

The Psychology of Social Media Popularity

Nobody is fully immune to the notion that a perception of popularity will somehow serve them. I’ve even heard it from people who have absolutely no business case to have a big audience. When I have asked people about it, they are often confused by why I think it is unimportant. A small number of them are honest enough to admit that they want the popularity because it makes them feel good … and it makes them feel more productive, or more important.

In itself, a Twitter follower or a Facebook fan or friend is a terribly weak way to measure your brand’s love, but I see it all the time. I have heard many instances of companies wanting to know how much it will cost to acquire “X” number of friends, fans, followers, and other useless measures. A much smaller number is asking how to breathe awesomeness into their brand and earn faithful brand advocates and customers.

Something those who participate in the popularity contest are reluctant to admit is that more social media connections alone does not actually equal true popularity, or value. What it can do, however, is make them feel like they are making progress, even when there is no true progress at all. It often just means those connections had the same psychological need for validation, and they are participating in the absurdity of implied reciprocity. These people are completely confusing cause and affect, and they are wasting precious resources, like time and money.

The hope is often to have hundreds of people tweeting and facebooking something about them. That is a different kind of popularity, and it means your message is spreading. I don’t begrudge anybody for that, and I won’t call them a fool. In fact, it is just great! That may actually have value, and it may land the right person to become a customer. It is a sign of doing something well. That kind of popularity is often due to legitimate reasons.

Many people think the perception of popularity is really important, but try for a moment to believe me that it is wildly overrated. Maybe you think a large faux-following will help your business, but what will really matter is who they are and how they feel about your brand.

Look at how you use social media, and then consider why you think everybody else is so different. Unless you are doing something totally different, and awesome, it really seems arrogant to believe that they are paying more attention to you than you are them.

What's your social media addiction, and is it time for an intervention?
What's your social media addiction, and is it time for an intervention?

You may find a number of people or companies that you find interesting, but don’t tell me for a second that you found thousands of people you really intend to keep up with and give attention to what they have to say. It simply doesn’t work that way. Have you ever heard of Dunbar’s Number? It works both ways, and unless those people are really interested in you, it is worthless. For the truth, just picture yourself as one of those random names or faces you see as you look at who you are “following” or “liking”. Do you really pay attention to them? Do you really think they are paying attention to you?

The Little Company That Couldn’t

I want you to imagine the little company who couldn’t. They set out to find popularity, and they paid a “social media expert” to help them amass an audience, but they wanted it done quickly and at a low cost. The social media expert could be blamed (and should rightfully be hung by the short hairs) for delivering them a group of totally disinterested people to follow them on Twitter and “Like” their Facebook page. The thing is, it is exactly what the company asked for, and they refused to see it any other way. It was what they were sure would work, and it was all they were striving for. They dictated exactly what they wanted, and now they’ve got an untargeted audience.

Months later, they wonder why they are still not seeing a return on their social media investment. They have a huge audience, but those people just aren’t rushing the gates to buy their stuff. It is often because they were too concerned by the cost of time, money, and hard work that they never questioned the return. As the company resentfully struggles with “What in the heck is wrong with those people?!”, the competition is doing great.

The competition saw the value of a strategy, and they stopped trying to be like everybody else. The competition realized that having a disinterested group of people to follow them, “Like” them, and pad their egotistical desires for appearance without substance will not be worth a box of frog toenails if they are the wrong audience.

Here’s My Theory on The Value of Popularity

I guess should know a little about this … I have a metric squillion readers of my blog, and a reasonably sizable following across my social networks. I don’t need, nor want everybody to like me, love me, or follow me. I don’t concern myself with a bigger audience, because I would rather focus on the right people, and give them something they want … something useful. That’s why the audience is there in the first place!

Without a focus on people’s interests, and doing something worthwhile, it has very little business value. I guess you could say that I am reasonably popular, but I am still working on the awesome factor, every day. That matters a whole lot more to my business and personal pursuits than just looking popular.

Even with a great audience, it still requires a lot of effort. The most valuable audience is often the smallest target of all.

Since I know you’re curious, I’ll share what my intended audience looks like. Maybe this will work for you, too. In my case, I seek people who understand the value difference between doing something, and doing something well. I like to help them visualize the difference. When it comes to the way it all helps my business, it is because I seek people with enough faith in their company to become my next marketing client. It is a small target, indeed, but a falsely inflated audience is not how I intend to reach them.

No, not at all. I reach my best audience by creating something valuable enough to you that you feel confident to pick up the phone and call me, recommend me to your CEO as a consultant on your next marketing campaign, share my knowledge with somebody else who will find it useful, or otherwise appreciate my work enough that you help the right clients find me. That is real social media business (as opposed to monkey business), and it is far more important to me than a popularity contest.

That’s my take on the subject. What do you have to say about it?

Photo Credits:
Heroin and Syringe by Michael Velardo via Flickr
“Red Face” sells? by Daniel Axelson via Flickr
Héroïne by Alexandre Duret-Lutz via Flickr

Twitter in Numbers: Marginal, Not Magical

100 Twitter Profiles Examined
100 Twitter Profiles Examined

I don’t write a lot about Twitter these days. I did back in the golden days, but many Twitter users don’t readily recall “The Golden Days of Twitter”. Today, I want to offer up some recent observations about Twitter, along with some rather curious numbers.

If you are an old timer with Twitter, you will almost undoubtedly nod and agree with a lot of this. If you are new with Twitter, this should help you understand the service in ways you may have missed. If you are one of those incessant spammers of modern day Twitter, oh yes … then you must be new, or you would have received the memo to explain how the Twitter Follower Frenzy just makes you look bad.

I want to offer a short bit about Twitter following, but then show you more about where Twitter is going for those people who are unwilling to adapt to a better, and smarter purpose for their tweeterizing. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to tell you the right or wrong way to use your Twitter … I will just give you some facts and figures and let you see for yourself.

Holy Bird Poop! Look at These Twitter Followers!

Once in a while, but less frequently than before, I check to see who is following me on Twitter. There are always a few new faces to greet me, and I like to know who they are, the best I can.

I used to try and follow most people who followed me on Twitter, so they could feel free to reach out to me directly with a private direct message if they should choose. It has never been because I was concerned they would stop following me if I did not return the “favor”, as if it is some amazing favor to follow somebody. Maybe they think it’ll make them famous … or at least feel famous.

This is just a bit of opinion, but it seems to me that following somebody’s Twitter feed should be because you are interested in what they share, or because you are interested in establishing some sort of communication with them. Am I right, or did I miss something?

Let me show you what I found yesterday when I looked through the list of people who, in theory, wanted to know what I have to say on Twitter. This table includes numbers I gathered from the most recent 100 people who followed my Twitter feed. I chose to follow a few of them, but I want you to take a quick glance through the list. Below the list, I will share some averages, and logical assumptions that a reasonable person could make.


followers following ratio more or less tweets
1097 1931 1.76 : 1 834 814
1015 1989 1.96 : 1 974 889
2977 2359 0.79 : 1 -618 815
66 311 4.71 : 1 245 917
202 1928 9.54 : 1 1726 30
579 2001 3.46 : 1 1422 1037
233 868 3.73 : 1 635 952
2099 2300 1.10 : 1 201 793
617 1170 1.90 : 1 553 91
6323 6459 1.02 : 1 136 1557
113 308 2.73 : 1 195 614
365 1002 2.75 : 1 637 456
12471 12861 1.03 : 1 390 18712
6265 6103 0.97 : 1 -162 4229
524 2001 3.82 : 1 1477 86
403 678 1.68 : 1 275 295
2362 2416 1.02 : 1 54 6160
9481 10427 1.10 : 1 946 9115
1938 1999 1.03 : 1 61 3486
1178 1956 1.66 : 1 778 1341
8439 8238 0.98 : 1 -201 144
1662 1956 1.18 : 1 294 325
1888 1902 1.01 : 1 14 714
112 138 1.23 : 1 26 504
2094 2305 1.10 : 1 211 451
729 1248 1.71 : 1 519 2588
5166 5597 1.08 : 1 431 7871
287 1685 5.87 : 1 1398 94
484 910 1.88 : 1 426 1069
334 745 2.23 : 1 411 7025
1123 1961 1.75 : 1 838 1448
285 351 1.23 : 1 66 4350
73 482 6.60 : 1 409 27
205 246 1.20 : 1 41 473
10859 11887 1.09 : 1 1028 1076
157 575 3.66 : 1 418 155
90 1229 13.66 : 1 1139 6
646 1252 1.94 : 1 606 1313
194 284 1.46 : 1 90 173
4169 3298 0.79 : 1 -871 4047
9107 9299 1.02 : 1 192 764
13779 10807 0.78 : 1 -2972 1650
990 1943 1.96 : 1 953 3135
174 393 2.26 : 1 219 115
175 376 2.15 : 1 201 58
35 242 6.91 : 1 207 22
431 905 2.10 : 1 474 10
1015 1113 1.10 : 1 98 1540
1691 1693 1.00 : 1 2 1237
1373 1979 1.44 : 1 606 527
272 571 2.10 : 1 299 457
438 1085 2.48 : 1 647 425
661 219 0.33 : 1 -442 154
1877 2055 1.09 : 1 178 3044
2204 2394 1.09 : 1 190 3359
2249 2393 1.06 : 1 144 350
168 796 4.74 : 1 628 6
60 922 15.37 : 1 862 54
301 717 2.38 : 1 416 124
401 2000 4.99 : 1 1599 76
48 405 8.44 : 1 357 10
3312 3635 1.10 : 1 323 2171
23141 20522 0.89 : 1 -2619 3126
329 720 2.19 : 1 391 13
12 41 3.42 : 1 29 27
2716 2964 1.09 : 1 248 1314
1066 2001 1.88 : 1 935 1405
242 601 2.48 : 1 359 53
272 373 1.37 : 1 101 10
806 1873 2.32 : 1 1067 447
1005 1628 1.62 : 1 623 67
1316 1442 1.10 : 1 126 48
134 653 4.87 : 1 519 152
293 1389 4.74 : 1 1096 76
149 2001 13.43 : 1 1852 11
138 638 4.62 : 1 500 17
4387 4788 1.09 : 1 401 55
4329 3688 0.85 : 1 -641 180
89 491 5.52 : 1 402 5
1121 1866 1.66 : 1 745 662
132 1030 7.80 : 1 898 20
135 226 1.67 : 1 91 66
2317 2551 1.10 : 1 234 618
380 1143 3.01 : 1 763 55
70082 73497 1.05 : 1 3415 1815
24118 21839 0.91 : 1 -2279 700
972 1384 1.42 : 1 412 522
140 146 1.04 : 1 6 472
877 1034 1.18 : 1 157 312
5337 5239 0.98 : 1 -98 410
65 257 3.95 : 1 192 108
3472 3779 1.09 : 1 307 1190
459 1025 2.23 : 1 566 73
572 1129 1.97 : 1 557 35
301 1097 3.64 : 1 796 489
548 2001 3.65 : 1 1453 2
116 1267 10.92 : 1 1151 1
194 1518 7.82 : 1 1324 121
130 177 1.36 : 1 47 15
61 400 6.56 : 1 339 1
avg. followers avg. following avg. ratio avg. difference avg. tweets
2820.18 3217.16 2.84 : 1 396.98 1202.23
total followers total following total tweets
282,018 321,716 120,223

What Do These Twitter Follower Numbers Indicate?

What I hope you will notice is that the average of these 100 users is following 2.84 other users to every one who follows them. That came out to the average person following 396.98 more people than are following them. A common strategy Twitter has tried to address is that of following a lot of people in hopes they will return the follow. Twitter has set limits as an effort to avoid this, but it is still alive and going strong. What so many people don’t understand is how worthless it truly is in practice.

Now, we could assume the 284 percent (2.84:1 ratio) means people are just doing a lot of “listening” to others, but I found reasons to doubt that. I have tested simply re-following everybody who follows me on Twitter, and you probably guessed it … my follower count goes up like mad! When I stop re-following everybody, it levels off.

This whole topic is much like I wrote about two years ago in an article titled “Follow, Unfollow, Re-Follow … What?!” In that article, I even offered a logical alternative, but apparently that memo missed a few desks.

Perhaps an even more important read for people doing this would be a popular piece I wrote titled “Social Media and The Absurdity of Implied Reciprocity“. Yes, I said “absurdity”, and based on public reception of that article, I think I built a pretty darn good case against this tactic.

What is Twitter Really Getting You?

I’m going to show you some real numbers that reflect user attention and engagement. Of course, there is much more to Twitter than just sharing website links, but since it is a valuable part of Twitter for many people, I’ll use website traffic to make the point.

Let’s look at some sobering numbers based on over 1,000 tweets, and their affect on website visits. Below is a table showing the ten most recent articles published here on my blog, along with the number of times they were tweeted at the time I wrote this. The total of tweets is 1016. The average number of tweets is 101.6, with the lowest at 48 and the highest at 228. Those are sufficient numbers for the point I want to illustrate.

Note: I’ll bet real money that if you click on the most popular ones, you will discover that they continued to receive hundreds more tweets over time.

In a perfect world, that will happen because they were just downright great information, but it also happens too often because enough people clicked and saw a startling number of retweets, and so they tweet it without reading beyond the first three lines.

Yes, in far too many cases, people will just assume it is good, because enough others thought it was good … neglecting that mind of their own altogether. Fortunately for you, you’re still reading, and you are judging for yourself.

I measure everything. Measuring and analyzing data is an important part of my job. So I’ll tell you what I found from those 1016 tweets, and their multi-million user exposure. The readership totals reflected great signs that readers were paying attention. They spent an average time on page of more than five minutes. That includes the 10 second clicks, and it is good time on page. The average pages visited by readers referred through a link from Twitter was 1.8, so a decent number of them clicked around.

Here’s the punchline! Out of this sample of 1016 tweets by many different users, the highest number of website visits attributed to any individual tweet was 21. The average number of visits per tweet came to 2.74. Maybe that doesn’t seem very surprising, but let’s add some contrast. Two years ago, I witnessed no less than 500 visits from a single tweet within the first hour of tweeting a link to my blog. My guess is that the past level of engagement and traffic generation from Twitter had a big role in its eventual degradation. Times have changed, and much of that change can be attributed to the following frenzy I described.

I Still Like Twitter … But …

I like Twitter a lot, and I don’t intend to stop using it any day soon. Twitter presently accounts for approximately 10 percent of traffic to my blog. I’ll take that 10 percent, but one thing I’m certainly not going to do is worry about whether a squillion people follow me.

The way I see the math, even if each and every one of those 100 users I listed above were to read an article and then tweet the link to my blog, on a sunny day I could expect 374 website visits from that (their 100 visits, plus an average 2.74 visits per tweet times 100). Based on their usage model, I think that would be a pretty steep climb.

The overall average engagement of Twitter users is very low. There is a relatively minuscule few who truly make good use of the service, and those are the ones I enjoy my Twitter time with.

What do you observe about Twitter?


P.S.

I hand-picked some articles I have written about Twitter. I hope you will enjoy these.

If you still insist on more, I wrote a book about Twitter.

Twitter Boom; Twitter Bust; Twitter Revival?

Shall We Revive Twitter?
Shall We Revive Twitter?

Are Twitter’s networking and conversation possibilities still compelling, or is Twitter mostly for link sharing and SEO now? The experience of Twitter is different for each individual, but maybe there is also a collective answer.

If you have used Twitter as long as I have, you have surely seen a lot of change. I opened my first Twitter account in April 2008, just over two and a half years ago. I used Twitter to announce my racing starts and results, and to let people know when my auto racing webcast was live. I was too busy on race tracks to use it for much else.

In the beginning, I was pretty unaware of the great value of Twitter, as most of us were, but then I decided to take a little closer look when I created my @murnahan account. Twitter’s usefulness really struck me after I learned about a fire that happened on the roof of my kids’ school, about 100 yards from my home, in a Twitter update. No, I didn’t learn about that fire by hearing the fire trucks or standing in my driveway and seeing flashing lights. I discovered it on Twitter. This was when I decided that Twitter was really worth a closer look.

Witnessing the Twitter Boom

There was a time, about a year and a half ago, when you were “nobody” if you didn’t use Twitter. It was a sudden craze that dragged celebrities in by the hundreds, and all that publicity coaxed people to check it out. Many of the huge boom of Twitter users were pretty skeptical of Twitter, but they just had to know what it was all about. It was a really amazing tool back then, for those who learned how to use it to meet people and build a network.

The Twitter boom was in full swing, but the majority of new users did not return more than a few times, and Twitter experienced massive losses of users. The number of new users was still skyrocketing, but the number of people actually using the service looked bleak. The loss rate was high.

Twitter is still pretty close to the same service, overall, and the tools surrounding Twitter were made better since that time. What has changed is in how it has been used, which is unique for each of us, but has a collective affect on Twitter as well. Like any tool, it can be used in productive ways, or in unproductive ways. A hammer can build a home, or it can destroy one. Unfortunately, many users have been influenced by the “dark side” and have been less than productive for themselves and the community as a whole.

There are many people who will choose to use Twitter to “build a house” rather than destroy one, but there are enough hammers swinging that it can be pretty challenging to recognize the difference. The confusion and frustration showed many Twitter users the door, and they left.

Twitter made it really easy to meet people, but this had a downside, too. I have met a lot of great people using Twitter. I have also met thousands of people who have no more use for me than to add another number to their Twitter follower count in hopes that I will click their link and buy something from them.

Are the Good Days of Twitter Gone?

Twitter became the easiest network of all for gaining a following of people. I called it the Twitter Follower Frenzy in an article from June 2009, and it just kept growing from there. I found that for a lot of users, it felt like an obligation to refollow anybody who loved them enough to follow their Twitter feed. Heck, I never sought followers, but somehow I ended up following over 20,000 people, mostly just because they had followed me and I wanted to seem politely accessible.

The Follower Frenzy led to a huge pitfall. Call me an ass for pointing this out, but it is really true, and I can tell you why. Twitter gained a lot of it’s popularity among marketers because it was fun, interactive, informative, and because it was a really easy way to bring thousands of people to a website. Once people seemed to “figure out” that anybody and everybody can be a “marketing expert”, Twitter was the low hanging fruit. Twitter would become the place where anybody could be a success by pushing out advertisements, or so they hoped.

How extreme was the lure of Twitter? Back in early 2009, when I would send a Twitter update I could watch anywhere from 500-2,000 visits to my blog from a single “tweet”. Less than 300 unique visitors attributable to a given tweet meant that Twitter was down.

It was apparent that anything worth a tweet was going to be quite visible. Twitter was really useful for bringing attention to websites, thus it became highly abused. It can still be useful for sharing information, but nothing like early 2009. It was really very astonishing.

I had a lot of fun with Twitter back then. Here is a video I produced reflecting the fun I had: Twitter Kids

Is Twitter Really Damaged, or is it Just Me?

It was easy for me, at first, to question whether I had just become less useful or interesting. I ruled this out, because all of my other networks and my blog were still doing fine. Perhaps I have become less interactive with Twitter, but that was actually more of a reaction than the cause. I slowed my use of Twitter as a conversation and networking tool when it started looking more like just another link sharing network.

I questioned whether it was just me who noticed a lot less interaction on Twitter, but I can definitively answer that this was not the case. There was a collective damage by many users, and there was actually a defining moment when Twitter started going down hill for me, and for a lot of others. Ironically, it was right about the time I launched the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends” which so many of my Twitter friends urged me to write.

I still find usefulness to Twitter for it’s search functions and for communicating with a few friends. I like Twitter, I really do, but where I have noted troubles with Twitter is in the number of people who took their follower count too seriously and it became a shouting contest where millions of people tried to get their 15 minutes of fame or to sell their goods and services. It started to look like a huge business opportunity to millions of people.

Collective Benefit of Reviving Twitter

The question of whether Twitter is worth “reviving” is a matter that is up to each of us to answer. We each use Twitter in our own ways, and we each see different results. A revival of Twitter is something that we each do on an individual basis, and it largely affects only our own experience with the service.

At the same time, I still hold some belief that if enough people took the initiative, there would also be a collective benefit. It took a collective effort to cause the damage and subsequent loss of interest in many people. Similarly, doesn’t it seem possible that there could be a collective repair and restoration of people’s interest if we reversed some of the damage?

I think there can still be a lot of great conversations and relationships built, but it will take effort. It will likely require close attention to follower/following connections, and making lists to manage all the information.

The days of massive website traffic and huge allure to inexperienced and shotgun-blast marketers has dwindled. The allure to spammers is still there, but it seems less pervasive because they realized it is no longer the goldmine they hoped for. The useless garbage is easier than ever to filter out if you make the effort.

Perhaps now if people will concern themselves less with unrealistic popularity and inflated numbers, and more with purposeful popularity within a core group of interesting people, Twitter can still be a great networking tool. That is, if we can bring back some of the interest of those great people who just became bored, irritated, and deaf from the static.

Well, what are your thoughts? Don’t be shy!

P.S.

I hand-picked a small group of articles I have written about Twitter over time. I hope you will enjoy these:

Photo credit to SlapAyoda via Flickr