Yes, there are tools to increase your number of Twitter followers. Yes, there are companies that will populate your Facebook fan page or will improve your LinkedIn activities. Some of these tools and services are fully automated. Some are purely a matter of outsourcing.
On Twitter, it’s perfectly possible to automatically follow people based on the content of their tweets. And your follower count will rapidly grow that way. However, it’s not about quantity, people.
There certainly are legitimate businesses that will build a community for you, content production included. Everyone does what he wants but the distinction between authenticity – a crucial element of social media marketing – and getting volume for the sake of volume sometimes gets really narrow.
Again, on social media it’s not about the number of followers, fans or whatever. It is about the mutual value.
Do the people you interact with for business purposes belong to your target audience? Are you relevant for them?
Forget the old ways of push marketing on social media. Again, Twitter is a good example. Do not start with one hundred tweets in one day. And if someone follows you: don’t send them promotions right away.
I mean, imagine that in the ‘real world’ you meet someone, you shake hands and the person you meet says “hey, if you give me some money, I’ll help you meet more people, or I’ll give you a book I wrote”.
There’s one thing I absolutely hate on Twitter: you start following someone and immediately get a message back saying “It is an honor that you follow me” or “I’m humbled” and then comes the commercial link. Fully automated.
First shamelessly flattering and then immediately selling. Block that follower!
What I don’t hate are Twitter accounts sending automatic tweets with relevant content. As long as they’re honest about it.
My message? Don’t push on social media.
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The entire internet (web) is not a suited place for push marketing. 🙂
So that includes social places like twitter. As soon as the receiver can determine which information he/she consumes, when to get that information, how to receive that information and combinations of those things, pushing is a guaranteed failure.
That should be one of the lessons we’ve learned from internet marketing the past decade.
You’re entirely right, unfortunately daily marketing practice still shows the opposite all too often