Buying followers for social media: the Pros and Cons, and what you need to know

Companies selling instant Follower or Liker boosts have been around almost since the dawn of social media itself. In the early days, we assumed that these companies would die out as users got more sophisticated and more able to spot those accounts whose “popularity” was entirely faked.  That hasn’t proven to be the case at all; in fact, the industry in fake followers seems to be thriving.

So, can buying followers ever help a business be successful on social media? Are all bought followers the same? What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? We know you’re wondering:  here are the answers!

What am I buying?

First of all, it’s important to recognise exactly what you’re buying when you purchase followers. In the vast majority of cases, you’re gaming the number that appears in your account bio – your number of Twitter or Instagram Followers, or Facebook Likers.  The number itself will be bigger, but that is the limit of the benefit you’re getting. The accounts won’t belong to real consumers in any normal sense.

The basic level – bargain basement followers

The organisations selling these followers, often based around “click farms” in parts of the world where labour is extremely cheap, have hundreds of people setting up fake accounts constantly.

The “quality” of those accounts (ie, the effort they’ve gone to to make the account look like a real user) varies from the “egg avatar with randomly generated name” type through to those which would stand up to some very brief scrutiny – that is, they have an avatar pic, something written in more-or-less coherent English in their biographies, and a handful of generic and usually nonsensical posts.

Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. You should NOT have to supply your password in order for this to happen!

Here are the pros and cons of this cheap’n’cheerful approach:

Pros:

• These accounts will generally continue to follow you, as they’re not being used by real people;
• They make your account, particularly at a quick glance, look more popular than it actually is.

Cons:

• To anyone who bothers to look, it’s usually totally obvious when an account has purchased these followers.
• Apart from the sudden jump in numbers, the accounts themselves just scream “fake” in terms of their meaningless biographies and nonsense posts.

Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Implausible name – check. Meaningless biography – check. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. Following a high number of people in order to get a few to follow them back – check, and very low ratio of followers to people being followed- check again.

Followers for hire

Another approach that some of the more expensive follower-sellers take, is to incentivise real users to follow your account. This can be just with a payment, or some other kind of incentive such as search credits on a directory site.

Pros:

• As they are actual social media users, there’s a (small) chance that they might read some of your content, and your product or service might happen to be suitable for them;
• They look like real, organically acquired followers to anyone examining the account

Cons:

• As the incentive is for the initial follow, this type of account is likely to unfollow over time as they purge their timelines of content that’s of no interest to them.

The real issue with bought followers

So we’ve looked at the pros and cons of artificially inflating your account’s popularity with different types of users, but of course there are much bigger implications. The only significant, long term benefit of doing this, is that your account looks more popular than it is, which may in turn influence the kind of people who regard that as an important signal. And don’t take a closer look to see who all those thousands of followers are. Therefore, you may gain some followers who wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with you.

The big downside though, is much more potentially significant, and the exact implications vary according to which of the sites you’re buying followers for.

In all cases, the number of additional followers you gain (who are maybe really interested in your product or service) will likely be a small number compared to the number of fake accounts you’ve bought. So you now have a follower base that’s the opposite of what you should be aiming for with social media – engaged advocates who are likely to show a return when you put effort into creating good content.

Now pay us to access those dead end accounts!

And where it really gets bad is if you’re going to do any paid for marketing, which these days is pretty much crucial to your long term strategy.  Twitter and Instagram (to a lesser degree) and Facebook (to a significant degree) all employ algorithms which restrict your access to your own follower base. Putting it simply, there’s no guarantee that a particular piece of content will be seen by all your followers…unless you pay for that to be the case. But unfortunately, none of the sites have a tick box for “just charge me for showing this to my *real* followers“. So you’re stuck with forever paying to show posts to that big set of fake accounts , in order to get to the handful of genuinely interested followers who are mixed in with them.

On Facebook, the situation is significantly worse. Being able to recruit your keenest and happiest customers to your Facebook page, and then market to them *and their friends*, is the real marketing gold. The social network of your existing customers is a wonderfully self-filtering group of people who are much more likely to also enjoy your product, than the average person picked off the street.

As soon as you buy followers, not only are you going to end up paying to show your posts to them, but you either have to stop using the “friends of Likers” options or end up paying to put your content in front of all the accounts who are linked to your fake followers, too. Ouch. Expensive, and self defeating.

And putting a dent in your Algorithm results…

In addition, most of the social media sites give your account some kind of a ranking figure (which you won’t ever be able to access) which influences how much priority your content is given in the timelines of your followers. Exactly how the algorithm works is very much a trade secret, but we’re pretty sure that engagement levels will be a big factor. And engagement levels are calculated by comparing your total follower numbers to the number of likes, comments etc you receive on a typical post.

So, if you’ve gained 1,000 followers organically but then become impatient and bought 10,000 more, the next time you post something, even if Jesus and the angel host are personally on your side, your engagement levels are going to look terrible because 10,000 of your followers are never, ever going to engage. So you are effectively handicapping every future piece of content you post.

(Bear in mind, that if you sign up to a social media agency who buys followers for your account, the same will apply – and you won’t necessarily be able to reverse it without binning your account and starting again from scratch….so watch out for providers delivering implausible growth rates!).

Is it ever worth it?

As with most things, there are some circumstances where buying followers could be a valid strategy – and we’re just talking from a marketing effectiveness point of view here, and leaving aside the ethical issues of cheating / misleading the public…

For example, if you need an account to look impressive in the short term, for whatever reason, and have no intention of doing paid for marketing through that account or building on it long term for genuine engagement.

If it’s on a site where you’re not really expecting commercial returns, but are using it just to influence brand perception (Instagram fits that description for some businesses).

If raising your follower numbers is the “be all and end all” for your management then yes, buying followers will accomplish that goal.

But overall, tread very very carefully. Once you have thousands of non-genuine followers mixed in with your hard-won real followers, it’s difficult to go back.

What is the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

If you’re familiar with Facebook marketing, it’s the Facebook Pixel but for Business to Business marketers. If you’re not: it’s a small snippet of code that you add to your website, which sends a message to LinkedIn whenever one of LinkedIn’s members visits your website. The code looks something like this:

Why do I need a LinkedIn Insight Tag?

Look pretty dull, huh? Well, it’s marketing dynamite. You need that little piece of code because when that LinkedIn member (let’s call her Helen) visits your site, and the Insight Tag lets LinkedIn know about it, Helen is added to a special list. That list is only available to your business, and it will allow you to target adverts directly at Helen, and anyone else who’s visited your site.

This has a ton of advantages, but the biggest ones are 1) you can personalise that ad copy to reference the fact that Helen has visited your site, and even personalise it according to which part of your site she viewed; and 2) you are targeting your ads at a very warm audience (ie, people who are sufficiently interested to have previously visited your site), which means you can afford to spend a little more on them.

And it gets better…

If you’re familiar with the Facebook Pixel, you’ll know that it has been allowing marketers to do that exact same thing for quite a while now. So why is the Insight Tag better? Here’s why.

Imagine that pool of Helens, the people who have visited your website, or maybe just one page about a particular product or service, in the last few months.

Now within that pool, there will be lots of people who aren’t going to be great prospects for you. That could be for lots of reasons, but just a few examples: You have a service that has to be delivered in person, such as consultancy. If your company is in the UK and the website visitor is in, say, Australia – there’s little point in marketing to them. Or, you have a big ticket product that needs buy in from all of the senior team within an organisation, but the person who just visited your site is still a student or a job hunter. They might have been interested in your product for all kinds of reasons, but those reasons wouldn’t include “because they might buy it”.

NOW, this is where the LinkedIn Insight Tag gets more brilliant.  You can filter your pool of Helens so that your adverts are only shown to those within the pool who are in the right geographic location for you, or are sufficiently senior, or are working in a particular sector.

The only tiny “gotcha” around this is that you must have a potential target audience of at least 300 LinkedIn members before your campaign will run, so you have to bear that in mind when setting up your criteria. Having said that, if you set everything up and actually launch the campaign, LinkedIn will start running it when that 300 person threshold is reached – because remember, your initial pool of website visitor is being added to every day. Which brings us to:

Why you need to set up the Insight Tag ASAP

Even if you aren’t planning to do any LinkedIn advertising in the very near future, setting up the Insight Tag sooner rather than later means that that pool of potential advertising targets is starting to fill up, and will be available to you when you do want to. If you wait until the day before you want to run a campaign and then install your Tag, you may (depending on the level of traffic your website gets) be waiting a fair while before the advert starts to get shown.

And one last thing…a cure for the LinkedIn Lurgy

The LinkedIn Lurgy is what we call the nasty surprise that’s waiting for B2B marketers in some sectors, when they try to use  LinkedIn to reach their target audience.  There’s a dirty little secret hidden in LinkedIn’s user figures: a very large proportion of its registered users log in very, very infrequently.  Take a look at the second graph in our UK Social Media Stats for 2016 article.  Whilst around 80% of Facebook’s users log in every single day, that same figure for LinkedIn may be closer to 10%.  Which makes sense, when you think about it; LinkedIn just isn’t such a fun place to be, and for many people, it will sit dormant unless they are actively job hunting.

There are certain sectors and job roles where users are very active – particularly those that involve selling a product or service to other businesses, strangely enough – and professionals in those categories may well use LinkedIn very regularly. So if you are marketing to them, no problem.

If not, how do you use LinkedIn to market to someone who isn’t there? Until now, you didn’t.

But.

A further option within the LinkedIn ad creation progress is to enable something called the LinkedIn Audience Network.  Essentially, that is a set of apps and website where LinkedIn owns, or is leasing, advertising space. Which means that you can use your Insight Tag, plus criteria filtering, to target your perfect prospect – and then market to him or her even if they never actually visit LinkedIn.

LinkedIn says that all the apps and sites in its Audience Network are “Brand Safe” – that is, not adult or otherwise inappropriate for professional content – but as you can see, you can also exclude certain categories if you want to have closer control over where your content appears.

So, there you have it. If you’re a B2B business, you need to get down and cosy with the LinkedIn Insight Tag pronto, and start filling up that lovely pool of warm prospects.

For many businesses, the path to a sale is far from simple or one-directional; that may always have been true, but has definitely got worse now that the number of channels through which your potential consumer can be reached, informed and influenced is so much larger than it was ten years ago.

A potential customer sees a friend talk about your product or service on Facebook, but they don’t take action. Then they see an advert on the bus on the way to work and remember the friend’s comment, but they don’t take action. Then they’re passing a stand in a shopping mall giving away free samples, and they think “yeah, I need to check this”…and they try the sample, and sign up for your subscription service. So what caused the action? Was it the stand? Or would they not have even paused in their tracks without those previous instances of your product hitting their radar? Short of interviewing every customer in depth about their entire journey from the first time they came across your brand, it’s really hard to know. And yes, I realised that this example implies a much larger budget than most of the businesses we work with have available, but the principle is the same. It’s quite realistic to be active on several social media sites, and have a google adwords campaign, and some instore or print marketing all running concurrently. Each of those would generate metrics, but sometimes it’s still hard to link those metrics to the bottom line.

It’s incredibly tempting to pick some pet obsession amongst all this wreckage and try to cling to it. A fixation with social media followers turns into an obsessions with cost per engagement in Facebook ads, which turns into a daily forensic analysis of Google Analytics visitor flow on your website. Whilst all of these metrics tell us something, they are far from the whole story, and the one thing that’s *really* standing between you and increased sales could be totally invisible.

I struggle with this in my own business, just the same as our clients do. And whilst there’s no obvious cure, there are a few steps you can take which will help.

First, recognise the complexity. There may be many things which contribute to a prospect becoming a customer, and they may happen over an extended period of time. That brilliant Facebook campaign you designed might not have delivered many sales, but it may have moved lots of prospects a step closer to you being their chosen supplier when they do buy.

Second, understand the limitations of the metrics. Be aware of what they can’t tell you, as much as what they do.

Third, try to focus more on direction of travel – relative rather than absolute. If your latest Facebook post got a lot of attention, look at what was different about it and try to repeat that – and then recognise that even then, there are a ton of factors outside your control (the Facebook algorithm, for one) and if there’s nothing obvious, all you can do is repeat and see if you get a similar result.

And finally, know that every hour you spend on Google Analytics will require at least one post-work Gin & Tonic to help you recover. So for most people that’s going to rule out spending a whole afternoon on it – Know Your Limits!

Can you get clear results from Twitter advertising if you’re a small business? You certainly can, but that’s not to say you definitely will. We’ve been working with Twitter advertising for a while now, and have recently had a particularly successful campaign for one of our outsourced social media management clients.

Here’s a short case study to share with you what worked, why, and what kind of results you can achieve.

The twitter ad campaign basics

The campaign was run for one of our longstanding clients, Urban Front Doors. Urban Front make gorgeous, contemporary hardwood external and internal doors like the ones in the header for this post – the kind of thing you see on Grand Designs (and often do, actually!).

Their designs are generally bought by architects and interior designers, obviously in consultation with their own clients, high end developers, and direct by clients who are project managing their own self build or refurbishment.

We have spent a long time building up a very targeted audience on Twitter – this is what we get from an analysis of the accounts who follow them, and it’s exactly what they’d want it to be:

We have run campaigns for them a few times previously, which has enabled us to build up a good understanding of what targeting is effective.

Earlier this year, they had a lovely promotional video created, which emphasised their core USPs of British manufacture and good craftsmanship. We thought this would be a good opportunity to try out a video based ad campaign on Twitter.

Setting up the campaign

In order to run a video ad, you have to upload the complete file directly to Twitter – you can’t just point it at a Vimeo link, for example. Once the file is available in the Videos

section of the Twitter advertising platform, you are able to customise the accompanying title and text, the “cover” image (what people will see until they play the video), and a relevant URL.

We decided to create a custom cover graphic featuring the #doorcouture hashtag that captures their product positioning perfectly.

The video will play “natively” within users’ timelines, without having to load an outside site – hence having to load the entire file to Twitter initially.

In terms of targeting, this was a mix of existing followers and similar users, with users who follow some other carefully chosen Twitter accounts. We’ve found this feature to be often very effective in “pre-segmenting” people who are very likely to be interested in the product. We also have a fair amount of data on exact click-through rates of followers of each account from previous campaigns, allowing us to prioritise those most likely to engage with the advert.

The campaign ran for just under a week – a Sunday afternoon through to Friday evening, to capture both professional and personal user traffic.

The results:

The campaign delivered just under 171,000 impressions; 2,089 views of the video, and almost a thousand clicks through to the website.

The total spend was just £250.

In addition, they gained around 200 additional followers during the week – a normal week might see around 10-15, so we can reasonably attribute most of those to the campaign.

We think that is a pretty good result, and the client agrees. It’s hard to imagine how else you could achieve that level of interest from targeted potential customers with such a small spend.

Quick takeaways

A few takeaways on the key things that contributed to this campaign being such a success:

• Build up the right follower base to start with. There was no follower buying, and no high volume following to get the numbers up done on this account. Their follower numbers aren’t huge – just over a thousand – but they ARE targeted, and particularly for a relatively niche, premium item, this is a much better approach. When we then came to target that base in an ad campaign, it pays off all over again.
• Fine tune targeting using data from previous campaigns. This level of effectiveness didn’t just come out of a first time shot in the dark. Having, and making use of, engagement data from past campaigns really helped.
• Consider every aspect of the copy and images – including the cover image for video. Working with some great content – in this case the video – obviously provides a big head start. But just leaving the default cover image means you lose an opportunity to get a key message across, and it’s just as important to copywrite the title and accompanying text well enough to tempt users into playing the video.

If you’re thinking about using Twitter’s paid ad platform, our advice would be a) experiment and b) track and analyse your data thoughtfully. You could end up with the best cost to exposure ratio you’ll ever get.

Initially, my eye was caught by a story about the Conservative Party spending over a hundred thousand pounds per month on various advertising and promotional activities on Facebook.

Invoices obtained by the BBC apparently show spends of £122,814 in September 2014, and £114,956 in November:

(Click the image for the full story on the BBC website).

So clearly, that’s a lot of money, but that’s not the really interesting thing about the article. Further down, a digital expert who’s quoted as currently working with the Labour Party on their online marketing, says

“I understand that the Labour party has been spending less than £10,000 a month on its own Facebook presence”.

Now, the spin provided in the article is simply that Labour spend less because they don’t have the resources that the Tories do, due to being linked with fewer (they imply) evil millionaire megalomaniacs stroking white cats in their mountain lairs. Or something.

But then I remembered something that had been very viral in my personal Facebook feed lately, and wondered if possibly the story was slightly different.

I wondered if, perhaps,  the Labour party don’t NEED to spend anything like that amount, because they’ve come up with a clever way to use Facebook which ensures that their content spreads organically, AND they are able to collect voters’ email addresses (one of the elements that there was a line item for in the Conservatives’ invoice) without any additional cost.

Maybe some of you have seen this in your Facebook feed? It’s been anonymised to protect the privacy of the originator:

Clicking on that newsfeed item takes the user to a website which looks like this:

Are you seeing how this is working, yet?

Person A publishes their “how many people have my name” result, and it appears in Person B’s feed, because they are Facebook friends.

Person B fancies getting their result, so clicks on the newsfeed item. On arrival at the website, they’re invited to hand over some minimal but important personal information*, and once they have “their” number, they are able to post that back into their own Facebook feed.

Whereupon, presumably, persons C and D notice it and decide to click and…you get the idea. Viral in its purest form.

And because it’s organic (ie, friends are sharing it with each other, voluntarily, through their news feeds) it won’t be costing a penny. There will almost certainly have been some initial spend in order to get the ball rolling – presumably where that 10k per month comes in – but unlike the Conservatives, Labour aren’t reliant on putting the pounds constantly into the top of the Facebook slot machine in order to get those all important email addresses out of the bottom.

The perfect viral storm on Facebook

All credit to the Labour party here, they have thought through every aspect of this process, and exploited the Facebook environment perfectly.

The basic concept (finding out how many people with your name are registered to vote) is simple but clearly catchy enough for many people to bother engaging with.

The website is carefully designed so that you fill in your details as quickly as possible in order to get your result.

And the graphics and text which go back into the user’s newsfeed with their result, speaks directly to the next batch of contacts (“How common is your name?“, not “I found out how common my name is” or something similar).

Impressive, right?

*re that personal information: here’s the small (really quite small) print from the bottom of that webpage. Assuming you read beyond the big red “get your number” button because, yeah, we all do, right?!

Simple, powerful, unique

If this one example isn’t enough to convince anyone out there of the kind of power that clever use of Facebook can unleash, nothing will.  Let’s look at the resources used:  A simple, one page website capable of collecting some basic information. A feed from publicly available electoral roll data. Some creativity to tap into people’s curiousity about themselves and their names. And access to the single biggest concentration of UK citizens, and their social ties, that has ever existed.

What is Employee Advocacy?

Simply put, an employee advocacy-based approach means allowing a range of employees to represent the company on social media, as an everyday part of their professional role.  So rather than “containing” social in the marketing / comms / web services department, it’s treated as an integrated communication channel like any other.

Think of it this way: your business recieves phone calls and emails every day on a wide range of topics. In the technical department, people are chatting to technicians in other companies about new developments and ideas. The sales team are talking to customers about how your product or service can help them. Senior executives are discussing current industry issues with their peers. Now imagine all of that conversation being funneled through a single phone number or email address: it’d be a mess, and the amount of valuable discussion would be seriously restricted.

And yet that’s what most businesses currently do with social media.

A big shift

So, a company-wide social media strategy involves a big shift in mindset. Potentially almost every member of staff becomes part of the social media team; but social media is also not treated as a separate discipline, but instead an extension of employees’ existing contact channels.

But it also makes a huge amount of sense: allowing potential customers to connect, on a personal level, with those individuals who are best placed to help or inform them.

What needs to be done

The main challenge for most organisations with this approach is getting signoff from the top, and making a commitment to allowing employees the appropriate site access and freedom. On a practical level, some kind of outline policy is a good idea, as is an internal communications programme ensuring that staff understand the strategy and what’s expected from them.

Basic social media training is also a good idea just to make sure that everyone understands the way that the main platforms actually work – for example, who sees what on Twitter. It’s easy for casual social users to think that they’re aware of all the implications, but it’s best to ensure there won’t be any embarassing mistakes.

Risks and benefits

For most businesses, the gut reaction to using social media in this way is fear – it instinctively feels risky to “open up” the company on social media. But those fears are largely ungrounded – after all, an unguarded email could easily be made as public as a social media post – and significantly outweighed by the benefits. Allowing peer to peer discussion – for example, technical staff talking directly to technical staff at suppliers or potential customers – is far more valuable than providing a single, generic Twitter feed.

In many ways, it’s also simpler for the organisation – provided that they are prepared to trust their staff – than having one or two staff struggling to create a “corporate personality” on a single Twitter account. It needn’t be complicated for individual staff members to hit the right tone either, once they’ve understood the principle that their social media accounts are for use in the context of their professional lives. They should have clear leeway to express their own thoughts and personality in conversations, whilst avoiding any comments or topics which wouldn’t be appropriate for an external email or telephone call.

Who’s doing it well?

IT giant IBM is probably the best known example of a company with a strong social media presence which is really distributed throughout the organisation.

If you’d like to learn more about this approach, there’s an excellent video (with transcript if you prefer it) on their strategy, considerations and challenges here: Employees as Brand Advocates: IBM’s Ethan McCarty.

So to set out the flag to start with, I firmly believe that the answer to the question “Can a company ever be truly social” is “YES – sometimes”. With a qualifying side of “if the mindset is right, and they’re not too scared to try something new”.

The problem with “big company” social media

The challenge is this: for many larger companies, the communications and marketing process is something that’s been refined over many years. It has often (though not always) been designed to prioritise safety over creativity. The need for a replicable “house style” has eliminated much of the sense of personality which can come through more easily in a smaller organisation.

The difficulty is, that those very characteristics which work well in an environment of multiple layers of signoff, redrafting, and static communications, are big barriers to effective use of social media.

A willingness to experiment and be guided by results, to trust individual staff, and to be both natural and creative, are all much more likely to build connections with other social media users – particularly in the consumer arena.

On a related note, this article about the process which goes into creating a single tweet for a large corporate is both impressive and shocking. I was impressed by the agency’s willingness to be very honest about what happens, but also horrified by the actual process. This is what you get if you take old-school comms department processes which were fine for, say, creating a billboard slogan, and map them straight on to creating social media content.  Personally, i think it shows in the resulting tweet, which is very much like a billboard slogan.

That approach works just fine when billboards are all populated by other comms departments using the same approach, and is therefore what the consumer has come to expect and accept. In the social media environment, it just leaves the company playing catchup against the much more immediate, engaging content created by competing individuals – ie, the consumer’s friends on social media!

What’s the cure?

Sometimes, a company’s social media presence is a reflection of its internal culture – which is one of the reasons why jumping in and launching a large presence can be a very bad idea for big corporates. Unwittingly, they’re providing consumers with a window into what the company is really like, potentially undoing years of positive, “on message” branding associating their products with, say, energy and fun.

There are a number of ways to tackle this problem. It’s never a bad idea to start with the root cause – if your staff are really stifled and can’t take a bathroom break without signoff in triplicate, the world has moved on and that’s going to be having all kinds of negative impact on your business, not just your social media presence.

Spending some time listening more than talking is also a good idea; starting to get involved with social media doesn’t have to mean broadcasting. Begin by monitoring what, and how much, is being said about your products or services. That often gives obvious pointers on how to move forward.

Empower at least one member of staff to have some freedom in responding – our previous post on social media policies might help here.  Personalise the social media accounts you use; for example, in a Twitter account biography, tell people  it’s Jane Doe in marketing who runs it. That automatically allows Jane more freedom to show some personality than if she’s tasked with impersonating The Company.

Finally, considering a more holistic social media presence through employee advocacy, rather than a set of obviously formal channels, seems to be a brilliant way forward for companies who are really dedicated to making the most of social media. Employee advocacy is something we’ll look at in more detail soon – watch this space!

Conveying your message creatively requires a completely different approach to writing for other marketing materials – at least, it does if you want to make an impact with your audience.

For this post, we’re going to use Twitter to illustrate, because it’s the most challenging platform in terms of creating great content; it’s noisy, busy, there’s a lot of competition for your target audience’s attention, and you only have 140 characters to play with.

So, how do you need to change your writing style?

Writing the Old Way

It’s so much easier to learn from specific examples, so we’re going to go very specific here to illustrate the difference between an “OK” tweet and a “great” one.

Let’s pretend we’re tweeting for a hypothetical software company. Our imaginary company is about to release a new version of its flagship product, and you’re going to tweet about it.

If you were following the “old” rules – the kind of writing required for a press release, or even an email to customers, the content would just announce the release:

or perhaps, shout about a few of the new features it includes:

There’s nothing wrong with these; they’re “OK”. A typical “OK” tweet for business keeps to the old rules; properly spelt and with correct grammar, and informal enough not to be wildly inappropriate for the Twitter environment. But, a “great” tweet does so much more.

A slam dunk Tweet

A “great” Tweet will be more engaging (in terms of grabbing the imagination of the reader and creating some resonance with them), do more for the reader’s perception of the company, and make better use of the opportunities Twitter offers. Here’s our take on it:

Obviously, the image is important, but we’ve just grabbed a stock one – your “real” image would show your developer team half-hidden behind pizza boxes, or a row of takeaway cups from a well-known coffee purveyor stretching away into infinity. You get the idea.

Good social media content

So what makes our last tweet better? A number of things, and these would be our “top tips” for making your social media content writing more creative:

1: Offer real Insight

The tweet gives a “behind the scenes” view of what’s really going on at Fabsoftware; the reader is getting a privileged insight. This is always more interesting than the official corporate line!

2: Humanise the organisation

One of the messages that the tweet very clearly conveys, is “real people work here”. Showing that, over time, is a great way to build affection and brand loyalty – and also perhaps more tolerance for the odd mistake…

3: Be  Entertaining

Playing to stereotypes about coders pulling fast-food fuelled allnighters – what’s not to like?!

4: Exploit Twitter’s unique capabilities

Including a quick snapshot image (even if it’s been, ahem, slightly staged) works well because of the sense of immediacy. And as we all know, a picture can be worth a thousand words…..

Change your thinking

Doing social media content well isn’t really about changing your writing style as such; it’s about thinking differently about how you present your organisation, and what you can share with the wider world. Get that part right and the writing will follow.

The thriving underground economy around buying Twitter followers and Facebook Likers was highlighted recently during the US elections, when Mitt Romney’s Twitter base expanded by an implausibly large extent seemingly overnight.

Most people are now aware that artificially boosting their social media audience is a risky venture, even if they’re not sure exactly why. Having said that, there are a few scenarios where doing this still looks like the logical way to meet specific needs within a social media strategy.

So if you’ve ever wondered how that tedious “business guru” with 55,000 Twitter followers managed it, and whether it could be beneficial to your account to do the same, here’s a quick lowdown on the industry, how it works, when it might help you – and when it won’t.

How does buying followers work?

A quick Google search turns up pages of websites offering to sell you Twitter followers, Facebook Fans / Likers, YouTube views and so on. Twitter followers are usually the cheapest, from as little as $5 per thousand, and Facebook Likers the most expensive.

The costs are  directly related to the amount of hassle involved in setting up a fake account, making it look vaguely plausible, and preventing it being deleted by the platform owner. There are other methods, but the majority of  the dealers who are selling these followers have set up thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, of fake accounts which they then control. On receiving payment they begin following your Twitter account with the appropriate number of their accounts, or use them to Like your Facebook page or watch your YouTube video.

With the help of some clever software, this can take the dealer a matter of seconds, so it’s more than possible to make large profits even at the kind of low rates they’re charging.

The key point, though, is that none of these accounts have real people behind them. So the potential for them to use your services or buy your products is absolutely zero.

They won’t buy…so what can they do for me?

This fake follower industry’s been around almost as long as Twitter has. In the early days, it’s likely that most people didn’t understand what was happening here and genuinely thought that they were taking a short cut to a large and genuine audience on social media. These days, many users know what they’re buying – but do it anyway. What they want from the deal is something different.

Here are a couple of logical reasons people buy followers, even when they suspect they’re fake:

1. Credibility. At first glance, a Facebook page with 3,000 likers or a YouTube video with thousands of views, gives the impression that it must be a quality resource. There are still plenty of social media users out there who can’t be bothered, or don’t know how to, see past the basic numbers. Having that big number visible can lead to interest from real people.

2. Sheep syndrome. When a business launches a new social media account, it’s friendless and lonely. They don’t want to show it to existing or prospective customers because it’s  the social media equivalent of the empty wine bar – there might be nothing wrong with it, but if there’s a packed bar next door, most people will choose that. Fake followers can act as “extras” to get past that stage.

3. Visibility boost. Some of the social media directory sites weight their search results heavily by follower volume, so the more followers you have, the more likely your account is to show up high on the list for, say, your local town. YouTube search results are also influenced by viewer numbers.

These are all perfectly logical reasons for buying in fake followers – provided you don’t get caught. Artificially inflating your numbers is against the terms of service of all the major social media sites, so ultimately anyone using this approach is at risk of being kicked out, and for that reason alone we’d strongly advise against it.

That short cut could be making life hard for you

If that’s not enough for you, there are a few other good reasons for being wary of fake followers.

Those great first impressions won’t last. If a Facebook business page apparently has a huge audience of Likers but nobody ever responds to the organisation’s posts, what impression does  that give? Visitors are likely to assume that it’s a dull place to be, and may be less forgiving of that than a company which is honest about being in the early stages of building an audience.

Socially savvy users will run a mile. Anyone who’s experienced in the social media world will spot fake audiences a mile off – a quick look at one or two of the Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts in question will reveal obvious giveaways in terms of who else they follow and what else they do or say. There are also services like Status People’s Faker app which claim to reveal how many fakes follow an account, and have been known to call out some big names in the past.

Skewing your metrics can have unforseen and damaging consequences in the longer term. For example, assuming you’re aiming to build a Facebook page with a genuine community, and you’ve bought Likers to bridge the gap until your audience recruitment strategy delivers results. A year down the road, Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm will be using the proportion of your followers who interact with you to determine how interesting your posts are – and how likely it is to show them in your Likers’ timelines. If 50% of your Likers are fake accounts who’ll never engage, you’ve disadvantaged your Page from the outset.

If a job’s worth doing…

…it’s worth doing legitimately. There are “best practise” ways to build your audience, credibility and visibility which will provide great foundations for your longer term social media presence, without any of the risks involved in buying an audience. If you’re stuck with those, we can help.

The attraction plan for building an audience is under control, they’ve got a great understanding of how each of their chosen social media sites actually works, but a large, worrying penny has just dropped. That penny is content shaped. What they’re realising is that the social media beast that’s being created is going to need feeding. Regularly. And forever.

How hard that actually is depends on who you are and what you do – there’s no doubt, for example, that Vogue have it easier than, say, a carpet manufacturer in this respect. But the vast majority of companies fall into the latter type of category; their product or service doesn’t intrinsically have mass appeal or fascination, and / or the day to day processes of their business don’t generate a constant flow of image or text-based assets.

So for most companies, the number one challenge of social media is content. Finding enough to say, that’s of genuine interest to their market, and which hasn’t already been said before by someone with more resources in this area than they have.

Your unique social media content strategy

Fortunately, there are answers. It IS possible to have a successful content strategy even on limited resources and in an “unglamorous” sector.

The starting point is always knowing your objectives for social media, and ensuring you’re on the right sites for your target market. Without a clear vision, it’s impossible to develop a content strategy.

Let’s take an example at this point: Old Spice aftershave. The social media presence they’ve built has been instrumental in rehabilitating the product, repositioning it from something loitering in the back of your Grandad’s bathroom cabinet, to a quirky, in-touch-with-the-zeitgeist brand.

Assuming that was the original objective, how do you translate it into content? Finding a lot of articles about aftershave is not only going to be difficult, but won’t help with what you’re trying to do. In this case, entertaining YouTube-based video is the cornerstone of the campaign, feeding into TV and magazine ads. So what do they do about Twitter? Great videos are all very well, but a Twitter audience demands more in terms of sheer volume – unless they were going to release a video a day, something else was needed.

The end result was a twitter feed of probably 80% original content, falling firmly into the “entertainment” category. The underlying messaging is “we’re modern, we’re original, we can look at things differently”:

Note: this is not an easy option. Keeping the energy up to produce original, left-field content is a big deal. But it is AN option, and one which has an equivalent for many industries; thinking about messaging first and content second can be very effective in solving the content problem.

Creating your own content

As a source of more substantial original content, you can’t beat developing a blog. This has many additional benefits, and is crucial for many – but it’s not easy either.

The biggest challenge here is that you’re competing globally. In some industries the online space is now so well supplied, by sites with enormous editorial resources, that it’s not realistic to compete.
For example, in the online marketing space there are sites like The Wall Blog which publish multiple articles almost hourly, and are usually the first to any breaking news. It’d be more than a full time job for us to compete with that, so we wouldn’t try.

The best fix for this is to be aware of your differentiators and find a niche; for us it’s tone of voice, a little originality, and ruthlessly excluding topics we know either won’t benefit our client base, or they won’t have time or resource to get to. Our blog is heavily informed by our consultancy and training work, too – it’s a great place to cover detailed but peripheral issues that come up in training, but which we don’t have time to go into detail about on the day.

It’s also helpful to focus on the space that you unarguably own – for instance, nobody else can provide insights into your own organisation like you can. Again, you need to work through the best format and approach for this.

If you offer an internship programme and are looking to attract more graduates, make “contributing to a  regular video diary” part of the interns’ job description; this will provide you with lots of content which is perfect for your target market, and offers them an insight they couldn’t get from anywhere else.

Content curation

The alternative option is that you source and aggregate content – known as “content curation” – either as the core of your content strategy, or as a supplement to your home-grown content.

This shouldn’t be confused with “implementing an automated RSS feed” – that’s not a strategy, that’s a disaster. If you see, for example, an insurance company spewing out links on Twitter which one week are about a nightclub opening in Jakarta and the next week about blogging for SEO, that’s usually the result of hooking their Twitter account up to an auto-search. These are keyword driven but almost always fall victim to the law of unintended consequences, as search results rarely deliver the fascinating, targeted content that you’d imagined.

Doing content curation well

There are some great tools out there which can help you with themed curation – Google Alerts, Scoop.it, AllTop and many more – but to add real value, you need to be doing more. Your value add here comes from two areas: understanding your market’s needs, and ruthlessly editing to ensure you only reference the most interesting and relevant content; and understanding your industry, so that you can add your own unique commentary and perspective on the content that you share.

Once you have your objectives, messaging and content plan sorted, much of the pain goes out of feeding the content beast. If you’re UK based and would like help working through this process for your organisation, give us a call.