On May 10th a bug caused every Twitter account to display the dreaded "0 Followers", causing millions of users to panic and contemplate their own "Twitter existence". People wondered if they would be forced to start over and if they did, would they take the same approach with their profile and strategy. Now a month later, I ask you to wonder what would happen if you woke up tomorrow and found yourself with a million followers. How would you react? Would you be thrilled or would you be in a state of panic? How would you engage with your new found audience? Would you do anything differently?
Before I answer this question from my point of view, it is important to put things in perspective. When I joined Twitter, I started slowly - sitting on the sidelines observing the conversations in order to get a sense of the flow and subtle nuances. After a few days, I jumped in and began ReTweeting, posting original thoughts and commenting on others' tweets. It was a great feeling when I got my first follower (thanks @BrennerMichael) and soon thereafter I reached 100 within about two weeks. Currently, I have a modest and manageable following. If I keep the same pace I should reach nearly 1,000 followers by the end of the year and that's only 0.1% of 1,000,000 followers. (NOTE: nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have between 1 - 100 followers.)
Personally, I use Twitter as a means of scanning the news headlines and learning/sharing with other individuals interested in marketing and social media. If I were to suddenly find myself with a million followers, the first thing I would feel would be excitement, followed by the pressure to keep these people engaged. I am not witty enough to send out a tweet every other day or so that is clever and funny like Conan O'Brien (who recently gained his 1,000,000th follower on May 25th). Sarah Killen, who saw her connections grow to nearly 30,000 followers when Conan made her his only "friend", told MTV that while she loves the added attention, there certainly is the downside of being scrutinized and criticized by thousands of people (try adding a zero or two to that number and think about how you would react).
For the most part, my strategy would remain the same as I believe it doesn't matter whether you have one follower or a million - the goal of using social media should be to add value to the community. Regardless of the number followers you have, it is important to listen, share ideas and be respectful. The biggest challenge would be managing this on such a large scale. In order to do this, I would take the following steps:
- Create Twitter lists and organize my following based on different categories and assign a day of the week to each group (i.e. Monday would be "marketing").
- Create a calendar of scheduled tweets based on the categories.
- Create hashtags for each category and announce a time each week that I would be online monitoring the hashtag and communicating live with the group.
- Set aside about an hour a day to respond to @Mentions and Direct Messages.
Now it is your turn - how would you react? Leave your comments below.
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