Regardless of your medium of choice for social media — Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, blog posts — the first, and easiest, measure of success is the number of followers you have.
There are a lot of social media articles out there that offer tips and techniques for building your followership. This isn’t one of those articles.
Instead, I’d like to explore why people choose to follow someone. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and, as far as I can tell, when people follow you, it boils down to basically three reasons — either individually or in some combination.
As you read through the three reasons, I invite you to think about some of the people you follow and which categor{y|ies} they fall into.
There are several people (and corporate accounts) that I follow because they provide information directly relevant to my job. There are others that offer useful tips for hobbies I engage in or things I use.
Then there are others who offer information that, while it has no practical purpose for me, I still find it interested. Mental Floss, for example, has, to my knowledge, never once tweeted anything that was directly applicable to my work, but their topics capture my interest and generally get me to click the link to read their articles.
When you find someone who has a similar sense of humor to your own, or just somehow has that gift of making you laugh, it’s hard not to follow them. Even if you entered social media with the most serious of intentions, having that writer who injects levity into your datastream has a way of giving you a quick mental break.
The example for me that leaps immediately to mind is GRAMMARHULK. Seeing horrible abuses of grammar being corrected by someone TYPING IN ALL CAPS IN HULK-LIKE SPEECH just makes me smile every time.
Social media has managed to create something wonderful. It goes beyond a mere way for us to share information with people around the world who share our interests.
Social media has given us ways to feel a sense of connection, across distance, with people we’ve never even met before. We sense kindred spirits and develop friendships without need for the formality of an introduction or even the inconvenience of actually ever having to have been in the same place at the same time.
For me, personally, one of the best things about going to conferences like EMC World or VMworld has been getting to have first meetings with people I already know…
Think about the folks you follow. How many of them did you follow just because you decided you like them?
Do my three categories cover all the reasons why you follow? It’s entirely possible I’ve overlooked something. If there’s someone you follow for a reason outside the three listed above, add a comment to tell us about it.