Today is Courageous Followers Day, set aside for leaders to stop, turn around, and thank those that supported them on their journey.  After all, how would they have gotten to where they are today were it not for those people who took a chance on them, way back when?

In social media, it’s all about the followers, isn’t it?  Have you ever come across someone providing status updates and information on Twitter or Facebook, without anyone listening?  For social media to work for us, to be interesting, we need to develop relationships with others, to provide something of value in our written words, and keep it up.  It’s always nice to have others learn about you and decide to listen too – social media is a very large campfire to tell our story around.

DUNBAR’S NUMBER

The Guardian newspaper in the UK in an article last year stated that the average Twitter account holder has around 126 followers.  I’m sure that the average has gone up since then.  Recently published research by Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford, underscores the long-held belief that the average person can only successfully maintain up to 150 relationships, even when looking at interactions in social media.

THE NUMBERS GAME

Up to last month, I had over 4,000 followers.  I’m not bragging, so bear with me.  I suppose I was doing well, if one provides a greater emphasis upon the number of followers as a measure of tweeting success.  I began to wonder about my actual level of interaction with my followers, so I searched for a few tools to help me measure my true interaction level with(or influence on) these people.

One of the tools I found and used (and I recommend you try it out too,) is Friend or Follow, which provides you, without having to log in, a clickable listing of:

• The people you are following that are not following you back (Followings)
• The people who are following you that you are not following back (Fans)
• The people you are following that are following you back (Friends)

Each of these listings provides a grid of avatar images.  A pause over each avatar shows each person’s:

• Full name
• Number of follows and followers
• Location
• Date last tweeted
• Date their Twitter account was created

Pretty cool stuff.  A question that arose in my mind was “What was I trying to get out of Twitter, anyway?”  After all, who you choose to follow creates your social media experience, right?  So what happens out there? What (and who) exactly do we all have to choose from in Twitter?

Not long ago, Pear Analytics of San Antonio, Texas analyzed 2,000 tweets from U.S. accounts over 2 weeks, and broke down what they saw as follows:

• News-related tweets from mainstream media accounted for 3.6% of the tweets
• Spammed content was being sent out 3.75% of the time
• Shameless self-promotion by companies made up 5.85% of the traffic
• Pointless babbling (incoherent on their own merit messages) were passed 40.55% of the time
• Conversation-based messages made up 37.55% of what was seen
• Passed-along retweets of others’ content constituted 8.7% of what was found

WHAT DO YOU NEED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA?

I know what I want from social media.  Relationships.  Friendships.  Community.  Just how much of this was happening with my 4,000 followers?

I discovered that almost half of the people following me (2,000 people!) hadn’t tweeted in over a month.  The average length of time someone keeps a Twitter account is about 18 months — had so many simply given up on Twitter?  Over 1,000 of them hadn’t tweeted in more than 3 months, and hundreds hadn’t said anything in practically a year.   How could I build a relationship with someone who wasn’t even on Twitter anymore?

I also found a ton of spammers, self-promoters, and a fair share of people who simply babbled on without actually responding to people who replied.  Among these accounts were a few jewels, shining examples of people who were using Twitter in the manner for which it was designed — to actually interact with others.

REBUILD IT – THEY WILL STILL COME

I began pruning my followings carefully over many, many hours, with an eye for the people that I either cared to listen to (regardless if they followed me back,) and people who actually conversed with me on a regular basis.  I got down to following around 800 people, (20% of my followers) and waited to see what happened.  Over the next 3 days, I lost 400 people in response to my actions, and not one contacted me to ask why I had dropped them.

I was still unsatisfied that I better start to meet my needs in social media.  After all, I still had thousands of followers who weren’t really there.  I decided to take a much bigger leap, and created a whole new Twitter account – an absolute do-over, documented here.  I followed everyone important to me, then tweeted invites to anyone listening for a solid week.  I then deleted my old account.  I was a new man…

I’m up to 530 followers now, only 25% of what I had before.  And you know what? The level of interaction is the same.  Although my followers have relatively more recent accounts, only about 20% of them actually say something to me once in awhile, comfortably below Dunbar’s magic number of 150.  And I am okay with that, because I simply adore these people, and I know they wish to build a relationship with me.

I still have my share of spammers and self-promoters following me.  I’ll welcome anyone who wants to follow.  I like my new, albeit smaller family.  We share our joys and trials together, and care about each other.

JOIN ME!

Are you courageous enough to follow too?  To interact with someone who will ask you questions about your life, who will provide assistance when asked, who will laugh, cry, think and pray with you in times of need?  Who will never ask you if your teeth are white enough, or if you’d like to see photos of me being naughty? Are you ready for some community-building?

If the answer is yes, then why not take a chance on me?  What are you waiting for? Please join me on Twitter today!