Lesson: Social Media & Branding with Crystal Lee

Step #7 Followers: Who should you “follow”? Who do you want to follow you?

If you're a clothing company, you want to be followed by people that you're trying to reach, you're demographic. Ideally, if you have a lot of followers who are also people who buy into your brand, loyal customers, that tends to have a domino effect too because they might retweet your tweet or they might see that you have a 15% off sale and there is a code word, they might share that with people who they care about too because when you find something good, you just want to share it. It’s an intrinsically human need and social media has been brilliant in really focusing on that human need and putting it online.

I would say you also want to be followed by people who are influencers in your industry. So, if you are fashion, you want bloggers to follow you. You want people who wear your clothing, who might not have purchased it, who you want to be seen wearing your clothing. At the end of the day, a follower is a follower, and even though some might be more potent than others, branding is still valuable on every level. So, luckily, you never have to choose between which followers you keep and do away with but the more the better and the ones that have the most influence within their circles are most likely to be your loyal customers. So, try your best to amass followers from people who you want to buy into your brand and understand your message.

You can purchase followers. It's a widely known fact in the social media world that there are robots; there are people who create fake accounts, who you can compensate in exchange for upping your followers. There are little tactics here and there where, for instance, you can follow thousands of people at once and those people individually get excited and they follow you back. So, even though you are not directly purchasing followers, you are purchasing a mechanism, by which with one click, you amass a lot more interest indirectly. And over time, for instance, you can decrease the followers that you have followed but those followers still stay on. So, there are different tactics used right now.

I personally like to stick with a genuine "I've met you at an event and you follow me." I think quality is more important than quantity although the ratio is also important. A high follower to a low follow ratio does correlate to a higher influence. Say for instance Justin Bieber. He has way more followers than the number of people he follows. So, a lot of companies are trying to emulate that because that's what they see really well-known companies and well-known brands have on their social media because that's information that is public. I think purchasing followers is an easy way to arrive at that ratio but it doesn't always come with the engagement that is indicative of a strong brand and really good value.

So, think of social media as a metaphor for people lining up outside of a restaurant. If you see a lot of people waiting in line to get in, something might trigger you to think that there is something valuable in there for all those people to be waiting in line. It's the same effect in social media. If a lot of people are following one person, that means that there are probably more than a handful of people hanging on every person's word or hanging on ever person's uploaded posted photo. So, it's really the same effect. The higher the ratio of people who want to see your information and the lower the number of people you are following, it creates this effect where you are one person. There isn't a whole lot of time for you in a day to go through thousands and thousands of people's content. Your news feed would be too diluted at that point. But if a lot of people want to see what you have to say, it is sort of an informal determinant of your popularity