I certainly am not the the one who has over 50,000 or 100,000 followers on Twitter or thousands of friends on Facebook. However, I do follow over 6,000 people on Twitter and have over 8,000 following me back. On Facebook, I have a little over 500 friends. There are other platforms such as digg etc. where I have thousands of fans. I have a few Facebook fanpage that collectively has over 30,000 fans if not more. These numbers in no way boost my ego or make me feel proud in anyway. Cause if there are 50,000 people that are following me on a platform and only 5 interact with me, the 45,995 are just numbers. And trust me numbers help. Even if they don’t interact they help when help is needed.

Think of it this way. If you are holding a conference in the real world what would your first concern be? That’s right. You want as many people to come in as possible. Now say if 8,000 people show up to your seminar, is everybody going to pay attention to your speech? I certainly doubt it. Once your speech is over, do you talk to every 8,000 of them and thank them for coming. Absolutely not cause it’s just not possible. You interact with who you can and you communicate with those that show interest in communicating with you. But what about the rest of the people that came to listen to your speech? Although they didn’t get a chance to talk to you or even pay attention most of the time while you were speaking, your name is now embedded on their brains. If you gave a talk on blogging, next time they sit down and talk to someone about blogging they might say “Ohh yeah, I went to a blogging conference once, X was the speaker” (that X is you).

You see my point. I know many of you are against numbers. I am against it too in some ways but not altogether. I can’t communicate with all and interact with every single one of em. But those who ask of me or just say hi, I do communicate with them. The rest are the numbers. Numbers that are not just there for the sake of being there, those numbers help me out when I least expect them to help me out. They are what I like to call the “sleeping community.” These sleeping communities wake up every once in a while and create some buzz for you. It’s always better to have your brand and name floating around on the web as much as possible. That’s all there is to it.

Numbers matter and that’s that. If you use these numbers to simply boost your shitty ego and say “I am freaking awesome,” these numbers won’t do you any good. But if you keep doing what you do, in a humble and respectful manner with 5% of your large following, the rest will follow sooner or later. Just make sure you don’t ignore the “sleeping community.” They matter and that’s why numbers in social media matters.

What’s your say? Do numbers matter?

image

Tags: Social Media, social media marketing // 3 Comments »