Twitter Dilemma

This is an excellent question but it would take about three pages to give a full answer.

Depending on about ten or 15 different things, each having to be qualified, either account may have the best results.

To really get an accurate answer one would have to have a lot more information and one would have to have an understanding of basic advertising those answers.

But the obvious point that is easy to answer is the number of people you follow is meaningless except in relationship to how twitter wants you to have a follower to following ratio.

The other simple but not a good full answer is if one assumes that the quality of the followers are the same in both cases, but the guy that has the larger number knows nothing about adverting or how twitter works, and the guy with the smaller number has great understanding of both. He is probably going to do better.

But the bottom line, there is no simple answer. Given the lack of details, there is only a lot of guessing.

Floyd, that was the longest "I don' know" I've ever seen.

;)

Ya, no kidding. I'm not sure I understand my answer myself? lol

But there really is notway to answer the question accurately without a lot more details. I just thought a good question like that deserved a more detailed answer.

Cynthia, hahaha I look at the horizon and all I see are other artists looking for land in this sea of subjectivity. And my question does not help much!

Floyd, something very interesting that I've noticed is that, once there, a single follower has the potential to make your day, your week, or maybe even your life. But these ones you can only attract with respect, trust and quite serious work (which converts to credit over time). Thanks to a little luck, perhaps, I have two or three of them there. One day they will wake up wanting to help someone and then fate will throw me in front of them!!

I was motivated to post this question here because I'm the kind that tends more to the second case (vertical marketing?) and I realized that most prefer the first one.

I think the person who follows only 230 people has true "fans." Like celebrities rarely follow more than 300 people and they have tons of fans. The one who follows everyone is just doing a trade, follow for follow and probably has less clout than the person with genuine fans.

@Alicia But you can not sell anything to the people you follow if they are not following you back. 200 followers would be worth more then following 2 million people with none of them following you back.

@Leonardo " I'm the kind that tends more to the second case (vertical marketing?) and I realized that most prefer the first one."

Ahhh.... now you are putting meant on the table. Target marketing is great when you can identify that target and reach him with a direct message and when that delivery method, like a direct mail piece, costs a lot of money, you have to do that.

But... on SM, there is no more costs to reaching a million people then the maybe 2-300 that you might identified as qualified prospects.


So, that opens up the idea that if you can spend all of your time working at identifying the perfect prospect 500 prospects, or you can blast out a million messages to a million people in which those 2-300 prospect are included and maybe a lot more.

This is why I do not totally buy into the much touted idea that you have to identify your market. Why?

The idea of target marketing is based on traditional media advertising where there is a cost of impressions. There is zero cost of impression when you use Twitter or FB or most of the other Social Media.

This is why I would rather have some one eases 100,000 followers than my own qualified 2000. The chances are greatly in my favor that there are gong to be more then 2000 qualified potential buyers in that 100,000 and it does not cost me a dime more in money or a second more in time to reach all 100,000.

There is also added benefit to having 100,000 followers even if only 2000 are really good prospects People see that many followers and it makes you look bigger in the market place.

Thank you, Alicia! Makes sense.

Nice pov, Floyd! Thank you, friend.
But when I put myself as a client, my first reaction to seeing both cases before me is crediting much trust the artist with 15,000 followers, following only 200 than to what has 100,000 followers while following them all. This brings me exactly to that idea mentioned by Alicia a post before, trade, purely commercial interest in their followers and it does not cause me good impression at all. I mean, for you to cultivate a long-term loyal customer base, it would take another view, I think. Anyway, again a double-edged knife.

Perhaps immaturity on my part. Let it be! Going against the majority we have a good chance of being wrong.

And just another thing, of course, 100,000 x 100,000 does not mean, in any way, that the artist does not deserve my attention. His work and talent would have little to do with such details. The problem is that sometimes our customers can make decisions for details, unconsciously.

You don't reach all your 'followers', so it all depends on who's online and how many people they follow; less your tweets get lost in fast-flowing streams.

Michel
✈ TravelTweet.

I don't have many Twitter followers but I have noticed that if I tweet too many images in a short timespan I lose a few - this I put down to slow connections and limited bandwidfth on their end. If they have no interest in buying anything then having someone else's art flooding their feed puts them off.

This, or they may put me on a list which stops them appearing as a follower - both I've done, and both have happened

2.) people who follow 109 thousand aren't really following anywhere near that many, they just have an accumulation mindset or an auto-follow button somewhere. And they're probably not big on retweeting anyone else.

3.) Most of the adult people on Twitter only access it while they're sitting on the can - this gives them an average of two minutes to catch up on all the news

" Going against the majority we have a good chance of being wrong. "

I don't know Leonardo. It may be that going against the majority we have good chance of being right!

I am going to say the twitter account with 110,000 followers and following 109,000.

My reason this person interacts more with his followers, I believe, to have that many followers. I've noticed - the way to do better with Twitter is to interact with others.

My view,

Here's what I believe the difference is between the two different types of accounts. Those that follow nearly as many as follow them used Twitter to create their sphere of influence, Twitter has been their primary social media from the start, it's what they used to build their "brand". Those that have tons of followers but follow hardly anybody are the opposite, they had built their brand on another platform and had a large following before jumping onto Twitter or that other platform is their focus and they just don't spend a lot of time on Twitter. So, the question is, is Twitter going to be your primary focus where you'll build your brand? If so then you need to do a lot of following, a ton of tweeting and engage your followers frequently. If another platform is going to be your primary focus then you don't need to worry so much about following back and engaging.

I'd agree with Alicia. So much of Twitter is a bunch of people following each other just to follow each other and increase their number of followers not because they have any interest in what the accounts they follow spew out. The account with 15K followers who only follows 200 or so of them most likely has 15,000 people who area actually interested in what they do whereas the one who follows 110,000 and has 110,00 followers just may not have anyone who is actually interested in their work following them.

Follow to get followed back is a shallow way to play it and rather meaningless.

Even worse are those who follow to get followed back, then unfollow when they don't get followed.

Work that out.

Michel
✈ http://pics.travelnotes.org/.

"I think the person who follows only 230 people has true "fans.""

I agree with this. I have both a public account and an private account on Twitter. I invite certain followers from my public account to the private ... the stats on the private for views and conversations are staggering. I work it like email marking for those who'd rather get my stuff from Twitter than from email. It's the quality of your followers ... relationships ... bottom line.

The worse (or better!) is that everything I've read so far makes perfect sense to me. Thanks, guys!
The best answer I've received so far is this clear demonstration that simply does not exist a consensus on this subject and by itself, it has already worth my post.

Another thing, unfortunately (or fortunately!) everything takes time and costs and good marketing requires as much dedication as produce the art that we sell. This is because some intelligence is inevitable to get a good result. The more methodical, better. It's like a gold digger: he did not go around digging anywhere. He seeks a vein of gold and invests heavily in it (which sometimes goes wrong, very wrong!!)

The big question, I believe, is to dig anywhere is far cheaper than investing in locating the perfect place, more or less as Floyd mentioned before (what, of couse can be nevertheless advantageous in some respects and certainly could adapt to my routine).

So, we write, write and say nothing! :)

I can not say that the second case is better, but particularly this time I hope that Kathy K McClellan is right.

it depends who they follow.

if one person has a 100,000 sheep, follow back crowds, they are only interested in playing the follower game and nothing else.

if another person had 1000 followers, people that read your message and may be interested - he will do better.


if one person has 15,000 and follows 200 - he isn't going to follow you back. he might trade links with you in exchange for a follow. its better to follow those that might have an interest in your work and ignore the numbers unless the ratio is totally out of whack. an unbalanced number set suggests that:

he paid to allow himself not to follow back
he follows and then unfollows


everyone has the ratio to keep it even.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Mike has a point, there's the issue too of people that paid for followers, so just because someone has a lot of followers doesn't mean they came by those followers legitimately. I do know one person though who did build her brand primarily through twitter. She has never followed people to get them to follow back, she lets people follow her organically, but she does follow back legit accounts, ones she believes to be genuine and interested based on their profile and what they are tweeting, she's currently following a little bit more than half of those that follow her. She is an artist and an author, but she rarely tweets her products. She'll tweet a product then pin it but all her other tweets are sharing her blog posts, other people's blog posts, quotes, memes, retweeting, responding, personal photos, news about her career, etc. She schedules 30 tweets/day. Twitter has been her primary social media since she first got into social media and she's been very successful with it. The big question is whether it's still possible to find that kind of success with twitter or is just too flooded with noise now, I have my doubts personally. I started out following to get followers but have since stopped, I let my audience grow organically though I'll admit very few of those that follow me appear to be real fans. I'm somewhat picky about who I follow back now too and have even started weeding out some spammers that I didn't recognize as such in the beginning, I probably following back maybe 50% of those that follow me now. What I do need to do is tweet more, much more which will require setting up one of those scheduler programs.

I have only just begun on Twitter. I don't fully understand how I can use it yet.

I have had lots of FAA artist follow me but is that the audience I want? Artist don't usually buy art do they? I don't.

Some one please explain to me what different it makes who or how many you follow has anything at all to do with selling your artwork to them. If they are not following you, they are not seeing your tweets.

It goes with out saying that you have to have the proper ratios and that the "paid" or "follow me-follow you" crowd are not the followers you what. But who you follow means nothing beyond that tit-for-tat follow back aspect.

It is one of the reasons why I perfer FB over Twitter. I can reach millions on FB and not have to follow any of them.

But raw numbers chosen at random, numbers of 100,000 or more vs 300-500 will, imho, give you a much greater chance of selling significant numbers then a hand picked few. The time alone that it takes to find interface with these people will eat you up.

But just do the math. How many sales a year to do you have to have to make $60k a year. Or even $30k. Divide that number into 500 prospects. At $100 as the average price of the purchase, that means that all 500 people are going to have to buy 1.2, $100 pieces or average spending $120 a year with you to make $60k. How likely is that to happen?

Actually, I think you need to be prospecting in a marketplace of million, not thousands.

"I have had lots of FAA artist follow me but is that the audience I want? Artist don't usually buy art do they? I don't."

I neither follow artist or encourage artist to follow me. I don't think they are high quality prospects.

You've got it backwards Floyd. We are talking about the fact that you do need to garner a high numbers of followers, not just 500. Depending on an account holder's situation he might be able to get tens of thousands of followers without following many of them back, that's where the 500 number came in, in the following not being followed. Nobody expects to make any money off of having just 500 followers.

"It is one of the reasons why I perfer FB over Twitter. I can reach millions on FB and not have to follow any of them."

It's the same thing on Twitter, following back is more of a courtesy thing. FB and Twitter really aren't any different that way, the only real difference is you can have groups on FB.

I am talking about the comments regarding the number of people "you" follow, not follow you.

And that "groups" being the difference in FB vs Twitter is a huge difference, or at least it used to be.

FB is now limiting how many groups you can post to. I believe they are doing this to push people into their paid ad program.

This is why I am no longer pushing FAA at all. Actually I think that do to no longer being that much involved on FB or Twitter with my FAA account, I should probably bow out of discussion on them in the future.

It just may be that the SM landscape is going to change more towards what FB is doing. Free adverting is going to become more limited and may go away all together leaving us with either paying for advertising or seeking other free methods. And I really don't see "free" being the thing anymore, anywhere.

I started seeing this 4-5 months back and pretty much stopped all SM and have gone back to paid advertising, but only for my other sites.

I am not going to pay for advertising to send people to a site that refuses to help me determine what is working and what is not. I need to be able to track where my money is well spent and where it is wasted. Actually I always felt the same way about my labor in doing free advertising.

I have made several adjustments to my advertising. I have turned on both the Twitter and FB auto post features to offset no longer doing an aggressive FB or Twitter campaign. This is something that in the past I did not recommend But it is at least a little something and better then nothing and it takes no effort or money on my part.

I am still posting a few things manually just to keep track of what is going on on both FB and Twitter. But the bulk of my advertising is now featuring my other sites where I get to data to see what is working and what it is not.

It is one thing to play the "post and hope" game when it is free, but when it becomes more and more restrictive, therefor less effective, I feel I have to spend my efforts somewhere else. Especially when all indications are that there is going to have to be money involved to get the results I want.

Shirley, if you want to help your fellow FAA members, you don't need to follow them in fact I don't suggest you do.

Log into your twitter account and search of FineArtAmerica and all of the recent tweets for any FAA member that has FineArtAmerica in their tweet will come up. Don't follow them, but do retweet them. That will help them where following them will no and it will not mess with you ratios.

I used to do that all the time. Not so much anymore since I am not using Twitter like I used to.

If everyone on FAA that uses Twitter did that, the reach for everyone would be hugely increased and sales would follow.

Funny how we discuss a subject so as deep and detailed and my only sale so far has had nothing to do with minimal advertising ... :)

One of my followers (one of the fastest supported me so far, a very kind person, by the way) has retweeted two of my artworks once to 60,000 followers (that according to his profile, an audience that appreciates art). Dozens of hits to my website in just a few minutes, a few favorites, 2 or 3 new followers, mentions, more visits here in my gallery...

No sale.

For those who still have only 160 followers it is a rewarding experience that will certainly return them something more than money, of course (I am very grateful to him for that), but serves as a demonstration of how the business logic works. I assume that my work is not that bad so, there is little logic!

Regardless of how it is done, on twitter or FB, following many or following few, it is very difficult to convert all this flow of socialization in sales. This is definitely a hard-earned skill. It's like debating about life on another planet. You start with a relatively high gross number of possibilities and as you begin to polish technically this number, the actual possibilities range from millions to a fraction of that in just seconds.

That's why I admire people who have reached such a level of experience in this field and, finally, actually can accomplish that feat. This ability is 50% of what separates me from them at the time.

p.s. Sorry about my English; second language!

I agree Floyd, retweeting is definitely more helpful than following. Each member could create a list on their own account and put other members into that list, that way you can keep track of who the other FAA members are without having to follow them. If a large group of FAA members did that, then retweeted every member of their FAA artist list regularly it could turn into something very good for everybody, or maybe not, I'm not sure how effective mass tweeting like that is anymore, it might just look like spam to anybody that sees it.