Posts tagged Mass Following

I have briefly discussed the concept of mass tweeting as a tactics used for garbing attention to the mass tweeter’s account with the hope of transforming some of those who are followed into followers. I have stated that mass tweets can only lead into attracting one kind of Twitter users, that is ‘mass followers’. This is a normal phenomenon since mass following requires searching for certain keywords, which means that those who tweet a lot have more chances of being found in search queries and eventually followed by mass followers.

What I will question in the current post is the common belief that such tactics are futile. Indeed, many would argue that mass tweeting is bad strategy for marketing since it attracts the wrong kind of crowd. I would argue the opposite. I think mass followers and mass tweeters are the right kind of crowd to be in touch with, especially for those who are into social media marketing. I will try to explain why it is so.

Mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers

First, we have to understand that mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers. There will always be a small amount of ‘curious’ Twitter users that will follow a mass tweeter simply because of the fact that there are tons of people who listen to Twitter streams and that most of them are ‘followers’ who don’t tweet that much. These curious users are valuable because they have the potential to blossom into qualified leads, meaning that if they are exposed to the right message, they will be interested in the product or service that is promoted. Since the proportion of these curious users will be small compared to mass followers, it will be hard to justify the investment of all that effort in gaining only a few potential qualified leads.

Mass followers can be profitable too

However, a closer examination of mass followers will show that they are also valuable to a certain degree. Mass followers might not become qualified leads, but they know that most of their followers will not be qualified leads either because they have been acquired through either mass tweeting or mass following. Therefore, the mass follower has to adopt a more rational relationship with most of his friends and followers. He will have to enter into a ‘retweeting association’ with his followers meaning that they retweet each other in other to profit from each other’s ‘curious followers’ that they have each amassed through mass tweeting and mass following!

Now, this is going to create serious traffic to a promoted product or service only if there are enough marketers connected to each other and constantly retweeting each other. This implies that they all use some king of automatic retweeting application that saves them from having to be retweeting 24/7.

The effects of automated tools on Twitter user experience

Who says automatic application means spam. My view is that while this is close to black hat social media optimization, it is not so bad since the marketing/SMO community seems to be very small compared to the whole Twitter network of 25 million users. In other words, these automatic retweeting software will only not seriously affect Twitter’s quality of service or user experience because spam will be filtered out by the ‘curious users’ who happen to be part of the SMO clique. However, these software will insure the majority of marketers that there message will reach a critical amount of curious users, hoping that they create the proper word-of-mouth.