To Follow and Be Followed

I was looking at my emails yesterday and saw that I had a message from Pinterest. It was to inform me that I had a new follower. Well I opened the link to see who was following me and discovered that it was one of my quilting idols.

Naturally I was honored. I looked over their page, repinned a few things that I liked and went on with my day. My casual reaction to this had me thinking of how my social media days use to be.  I thought back to a time when I would have immediately tweeted about who was following me and would have even made a blog post about how happy I was to have this person follow me.

I have noticed in social media how we put a lot of stock into how many followers we have and who's following who. Every so often a celebrity hits a milestone in the number of followers they have on Twitter, which the media considers newsworthy. Bloggers have contest in celebration of hitting a certain large number of followers. And every week Facebook is kind enough to send me a recommended list of people I should be following.

But why do we follow and why do we want to be followed?

Sure a large readership is nice to have. It is assumed that if someone follows you, then they must be interested in what you have to say and will come back and look at your site often. But truth be told, I have followed many different people in the past and have not gone back to look at their site or visit their social media pages.

In the beginning of my social media life I was told that when someone follows you you must follow them back. Or if you want someone to follow you, you should follow them first. This was proper social media etiquette. So, I blindly followed with no regard to what I was following. I was simply doing it as a courtesy to those who followed me.  Following and being followed just became this automatic response like saying 'Good morning', when someone says good morning to you.

I got sucked into the numbers game too. Like so many people, I thought the more 'friends' and 'likes' I had, the more popular I was. I wanted followers in order to feel important. Trying to become a professional blogger, the higher the numbers, the more sponsors and advertisers would take me seriously and want to work with me. So, then I started following anyone who promised to follow me back. I got on every link party and Facebook like page exchange I could get on.

Where did all this following lead me? Spending more time clicking on pages then actually writing anything of substance. It also got me a lot of junk streaming into my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Somewhere in all that, I got a very famous person following me on Twitter. I hadn't followed her before. She wasn't even someone I had considered following. So I decided to follow her back. When I looked at her page I saw numbers that surprised me. She had a huge list of followers, but she was only following less then fifty people.

She didn't 'return the favor' every time someone followed her. She was selective in who she chose to follow. She was engaging in real conversation with people who she felt had something worthy to say.

This changed my whole way looking at social media numbers. I realized that the quality of my readership was far more important to me then the quantity. I also realized that the number of hits I received on my blog reflected a better sense of my readership then the number of followers I had. At the time of this blog posting I have less then a handful of followers on this blog, but the number of hits I have each day lets me know that people are finding this blog and enjoy reading what I have to say. And for that, I am thankful.