I had a couple of my clients ask the same question yesterday. They were looking at who to follow on Twitter, and both of them wanted to skip over people who had a very small number of followers. They also both asked about people with protected tweets.
I thought those made good topics to discuss here.
Few Followers
To follow them or not? To decide, look at your Twitter goal. Are you looking for people to promote you? Then they probably won’t be a big help. Are you looking for content to retweet? Again, they probably won’t be much help.
Well then what good are they?
Ah, but are you looking for potential customers or your next raving fan? If so, you might want to take a second look. Remember that having 20 followers today doesn’t mean they will always have 20. Most of us started with a small number that grew over time.
If someone is only following a small number of people, your tweets won’t get lost in a larger stream. Once you are following more than 100 people, its virtually impossible to keep up with every tweet in your stream. You have an opportunity to build a relationship now. Then as they follow more people, you’ll still be someone to pay attention to.
This is particularly important if you are a retail business. People with low followers/following numbers are often real people, not a business or spammer. If their interests coincide with your business services or products, they are excellent potential customers and worthy of following.
I recommend following them back. Build the relationship now and make them raving fans.
Protected Accounts
What about those people with protected tweets? I tell my clients not to worry about them. There’s no harm in them following you. You can’t build a relationship with them easily, but if they read your posts, fine. You probably won’t be able to follow them back, but that’s okay. They aren’t hurting and might eventually help.
Anyone else have something to add?
Tags: social media
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Juli Monroe. Juli Monroe said: Are people with few followers worth following back? http://bit.ly/ad84Ww [...]
Hold on a second. Are your clients referring to tweeps who are following them and whether they should reciprocally follow, or whether they should follow tweeps who meet xyz criteria but may not follow them?
Regardless, two things to keep in mind:
1. Over 70% of new Twitter users quit in the first month but don’t cancel their account, and assume the other 30% are ripe of spammers, porn artists, and broadcasters. So, assume further than 1% to 5% of one’s followers are active caring repliers and retweeters.
2. Also, unless that person knows zero people outside of Twitter, chances are great that one will share content outside of Twitter, e.g. on a Facebook wall or through email or printing something out on the company bulletin board.
Numbers mean squat, in other words.
I don’t disagree with you about numbers meaning squat. Which was kind of my point. My clients are obsessing about the number of followers their followers have. You can have a loyal follower who promotes you who himself has very few followers on Twitter. That follower may talk about your service in real life or, like you say, promote through other forms of media.
And I think there is value in following back the person who has few followers. It’s sort of a “reward” for following me.
I think you and I agree. But I’m thinking I didn’t make my point very well in my post. Sorry for that.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Juli Monroe. Juli Monroe said: Are people with few followers worth following back? http://bit.ly/ad84Ww [...]
ohh wow this is boss thanks aha uhm yeah anyone who has twitter follow me please ill follow you back http://twitter.com/gr8p