Social Media – How Do You Find Friends and Followers?

Developing a web presence – even if you don’t need one now!

By Kevin M

Last week in Multiple Income Streams to replace One Man-One Job?, we discussed the need to broaden our sources of income in response to the gradual disappearance of traditional full-time, salaried/benefited jobs. The suggestions given called for increasing self-reliance through a mix of self-employment, soft-employment, expanding networks and more conservative personal finances.

In the post we touched on the need to develop a web presence, a virtual requirement in the business landscape of the 21st Century. Today we’ll go into greater detail on that single component.

My purpose in writing this post is two-fold: to share with you what I’m doing to build my web presence, and hopefully to find out from you what it is you’re doing to develop yours,

We ALL need a web presence

As globalization has rapidly come to define the world economy, we need to crawl out of our cubbyholes and find a way to connect with the entire planet. Our future survival could depend on it.

Fortunately, making that connection is remarkably easy. Here’s what I’ve figured out:

1. Start with a simple website or weblog. You don’t need to have something to sell, you’re just establishing a little foothold somewhere on the world wide web.
2. Next join the social media—Twitter, Facebook, Linked In or any others that appeal to you, with links back to your website. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing, just watch what others are doing and play along.
3. Expand your contacts gradually; even if you don’t need to now, you want to have largest possible web presence established for the day when you do.

A list of followers, fans, friends or what ever they’re called in a given network is a potential market for what ever you have to offer. It can be like having a perpetual ad space in a popular newspaper, except you don’t have to pay for it. The internet has become the market place for the 21st Century and is increasingly where business is being done.

My Twitter story

A little bit of background here…I managed to go most of my working life in career fields where a web presence wasn’t necessary—desirable perhaps, but not necessary. While that happy little coincidence may have been comfort-zone friendly, it rendered me a technological cripple.

I launched OutOfYourRut in April of 2009 with both hands tied behind my back. Most of the successful bloggers that I know have IT backgrounds—I had to buy a “how to” book to learn HTML! Fortunately, a close friend developed a blogging platform from the ground up, but the demands of setting up and running a blog day to day didn’t work for either of us—I have to make this up to him but that’s a story for another day.

In August, I reluctantly decided to switch over to WordPress, and for technical reasons, my friend couldn’t help me with that. I’d known about WordPress, but being technically challenged, getting into it was intimidating, especially hearing terms like “plug-ins”, “widgets”, “RSS feeds”, “SEO” and the like. Now I might have heard these terms as a kid when I watched science fiction movies but for what ever reasons they never stuck in my mind in the visual way that ray guns and brain transplants did. I was beyond clueless.

Fortunately WordPress is pretty user friendly and I was already getting help and suggestions from fellow bloggers who were providing direction and answering my successions of repetitive newbie questions. This is one of the almost unheralded benefits of networking, getting to know and benefit from the knowledge of others. I hope I’ll be able to reciprocate as I gain more experience.

At the suggestion of Matt Jabs at Debt Free Adventure, I started a Twitter account back in June. I wasn’t looking to get on Twitter, nor did I know what it did, but he said it was a good way to promote a website. I took his advice, set up the account, then did what any certified anti-techie would do–nothing!

The account sat dormant for five months. Just before Thanksgiving I decided to finally do something with it. My friend Dave Kelly, though not an expert, was already up and running on Twitter and he helped me with the tactical details. I started with seven followers (NO idea how they got there!) and zero knowledge, and as of this writing, just two months later, I’m up to over 700!

How I did it

Here’s where this post gets really boring—my road to 700. There’s no magic, no oooh-aaah-wow moment—just a lone tech idiot pushing a big (square) boulder up a very big hill.

The key to Twitter is getting followers—people who are receiving your tweets—but how does one do that? The answers coming back were to 1) follow others and 2) send out tweets. Having no idea what to tweet, I decided to start out by following others. At first I’d follow 10 new people per day and found that three or four would reciprocate and follow me. I increased to follow 20 per day, and sure enough the number following me increased to seven or eight per day. This is cool!

Now, there’s one flaw in this approach. Since only about 1/3 of the people I follow will follow me, my Twitter balance sheet gets lopsided. Very quickly my “following” list is twice as big as my “followers” list. This can’t be good; I’m getting their crap but they won’t take mine—not fair!

I played around with my following list trying to see if there was a way to delete the people on it who weren’t following me. Light bulb (!): I’ll delete the entire following list then rebuild it from my followers list—I’m SO totally Brilliant! I deleted 550 names—one at a time—then add back 300—one at a time…

There’s an easier way to do that but I didn’t even know enough to ask the question.

Now all the while I’m doing this with a standard-issue Twitter pink chicken as my avatar—an avatar’s an avatar right? I began to realize that the pink chicken wasn’t making too many friends and there needed to be a change. Angie Roda (ten21 web+print) created a new avatar with a the initials OOYR superimposed in white over a tropical beach scene. Immediately, my following-to-followers conversion rate jumped from 1/3 to over half.

Along the way I started sending out tweets—one a time. In an act of apparent mercy, Jason Topp at Redeeming Riches recommended setting up on Hootsuite, a site that enables you to manage your Twitter account and even schedule your tweets. Wow, this is getting real easy!

Which means it’s high time for…a Rookie Mistake! With the new ease in tweeting, I set up to do 12 tweets per hour, one every five minutes, 10 hours per day. That should get them beating a path to my follower list!

As soon as I started doing that, I began to notice that my follower list was no longer increasing. It’s late-December, so I blame it on the holidays. But an email comes in from Nickel at Five Cent Nickel saying that I was running a risk of losing followers by retweeting the same stuff all day. Best advice I ever got telling me not to do something. I cut down the number of scheduled tweets from 12 per hour to two, and changed from tweeting my web post titles to mostly bits of post content. The follower increases resumed and accelerated.

My following-to-followers conversion is now in the 75-80% range, probably as a result of seeing tweets with an eye catching avatar along with sometimes interesting content.

This approach to building my follower list is admittedly on the labor intensive side. But unless someone introduces me to a better way of increasing my follower list—and it needs to be cheap, cheap, cheap—I’ll put my blinders back on and keep pushing the boulder up the hill.

The payoff

700 followers is relatively small in the Twitter universe, but it’s already generating a noticeable increase in web traffic. The only thing mildly remarkable about the climb from 7 to 700 is that it was accomplished by a tech idiot (which would be me) with no prior knowledge of Twitter and in just a couple of months.

Many Twitter veterans have thousands, even tens of thousands of followers. Think about the traffic they’re bringing to their websites, the revenue it’s producing, or the influence their writings are carrying to many thousands of people? Can we afford not to have that as well?

What ever social network you’re using, develop as large a contact base as you can and do it now. You may not have anything to sell, but when the day comes that you do, you’ll have a potential market for it already in place. Having a list of several thousand contacts might even motivate you to get a product to sell!

One of the most compelling aspects of the world wide web is that it gives us the ability to transcend borders from the comfort of our homes. Make a decision to join the global economy instead of complaining about it. Even if you don’t think you need it, get connected. Business is about people, and good things start to happen when you connect with as many as possible.

Next challenge: Facebook…

What are the ways you’re using to find friends and followers in the social media? Do you prefer Twitter? Facebook? Linked In? Others? Have you paid for a service or consultant to develop your “fan base”? We’re you satisfied with the results?