I’m on FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, and yes, even MySpace. Honestly, I spend most of my social media time on Twitter, with FaceBook coming in a close second.
On Twitter, I maintain a number of “lists” where I can group people I follow into categories that make sense. The lists let me read the tweets in a more organized way…for example, I have a list named “Best Bets” that are people I am friends with (really friends, not just casual follows) and tweeps who I find particularly interesting for some reason. This is a small list of only about ten people, so it’s easy to keep track of and read each and every post they make.
I have lists for writers/authors, musicians, poets, racecar drivers, and more. While some of the lists are fairly large, the groupings still let me focus on a particular topic as I read the tweets.
The vast majority of the 4,000+ tweeps I follow are in one or more lists.
On all of Twitter, there are exactly six tweeps I follow who don’t follow me back. Depending on your definition, none of them are “celebrities”. None are politicians, either. One of them is the Dali Lama. The Dali Lama has on the order of five-and-a-half million followers, and he doesn’t follow anyone. On the other hand, he’s very wise and I like what he has to say.
The real bottom line is that I follow very few people who don’t follow me, and the reason is very simple…
Odds are that someone who isn’t interested in what I have to say has nothing to say that is of any interest to me.
Call that arrogant if you like, but the fact is that the vast majority of Twitter users will not follow you if you don’t follow them. And most serious studies put the number in excess of 90%.
Every few days I will wade through my followers and those I follow. If someone has stopped following me, I stop following them. I also will stop following people who have not tweeted in the last 90 days, but I keep an eye on them…if they tweet again, I follow them again.
Along with this, I also purge my several Twitter lists…anyone I am not following gets removed from the lists. And it is this practice that got me thinking about something…
Churn Rate: (sometimes called attrition rate) In its broadest sense, is a measure of the number of individuals or items moving out of a collective over a specific period of time. (From Wikipedia)
In other words, what is the rate of tweeps who unfollow people?
I am primarily concerned with the churn rate for authors and writers. I have three lists that relate to this field: Writers, Writers2, and Writing Helpers. The first two lists are self explanatory and there are two lists due to the limits of how many tweeps can be in one list. Writing Helpers is primarily publishers, cover artists, reviewers, and similar “support” services for writers. In a typical month, the churn rate in these three lists is about 2%.
Now…I also have a list called Music that is mostly musicians and bands. There are a small handful of music production services in there, but just tiny fraction. The churn rate for the music list members is much smaller…over a month, perhaps 0.04%.
For all of the other lists, a typical monthly churn is about 0.09%.
What does all of this mean?
Sorry folks, but it means that authors are, by and large, totally clueless about how social media promotion works.
Remember when I mentioned MySpace above? Some of you may sneer, and maybe you should. MySpace is, frankly, dead and doesn’t know it yet, but MySpace was also the first of the social media sites. In the early days, music professionals and bands swarmed to MySpace to promote themselves, and they did a good job with it. More to the point, they learned a lot…
The key thing they learned is that if they didn’t show an interest in—and a respect for—people who followed them on MySpace, those people would stop following them.
And those people are their fans, the ones who buy their product. In other words, they pay the musician’s salary.
Sadly, writers don’t seem to understand this.
Some of that has to do with the flood of new writers in the various “self publishing” venues. Like all new writers, they want to change the world and have the attitude that sales don’t matter.
Sure they don’t. Keep telling yourself that while you slowly starve to death…or keep working at that job you claim to hate so much.
Some is connected to the idea that a reader will never stop reading your books no matter what you do. Right…let me know how that works out for you. Oh, that’s right…you can’t afford Internet access now and the library’s free access is all full up with other starving writers.
The real deal here is that writers need to learn the lessons that the musicians did long ago, and that is to avoid unfollowing people on Twitter. And the other social media sites, too. Create lists or groups or circles, or what-have-you to organize things so you can manage the data flow.
In other words, wake up and smell the money.
Keep Loving!
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