Sanders Says - What if you lost all your followers?

August 20, 2010

What if you lost all your followers?

Yesterday, a Twitter system issue caused me to temporarily lose all my followers. One moment I had over 11,000, the next moment .... 0. The tweets were there, the following was gone. Poof! The day before, a friend of mine lost his Facebook account due to a (disputed) terms of service violation. He's been on for years, and had hundreds of friends there. Poof!

Fortunately for me, I got my account restored. Unfortunately for my friend, he's probably lost his forever. The whole experience begs the question: Marketers -- What would you do if you lost your following? It's very possible this can happen to you, and if it does, there's very little you can do about it. Think you can call Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook like you can call Zappos? Wrong. You'll send emails, get form replies from dispassionate 20-somethings (that could care less about NetPromoter scores) ... and you are at their mercy.

A few years ago, when working at Yahoo!, I'd get frantic emails from people that lost their Mail accounts - losing tens of thousands of archived emails, etc. along the way. They too couldn't get a caring person on the phone and in very rare situations, I could help them. What do they do now? They use an email client (like Apple Mail, Entourage or Outlook) where all the data sits on your machine - not 'out there'.

If you are putting time into social media to drive your business, and building up an audience (following) to target - you need to find ways to localize the relationships to regain control of your destiny. If you are going to trust Twitter or Facebook to manage your following, you are really vulnerable. Here are a few takeaways for you:

1. Don't use social media to build up a big audience you can monetize later - If you use social media of any type, do it to be helpful. Think of your followings as congregations you help, not targets you can pound when your product launch is at hand. If you are helpful enough, your following will click over to your blog (and subscribe to the feed) or sign up for your monthly newsletter (now their in your domain). They key to conversion though, is a steadfast commitment to being helpful, not markety.

2. Back up your social media following: For Twitter, run Tweetake once a month (this free service will download your following, tweets, etc. to a spreadsheet). For Facebook, you can use SocialSafe. If you lose either following, you can hire a virtual service to either message them to rejoin (Facebook) or follow them on Twitter (where about 70% will follow back). Neither solution is complete or easy, but it beats losing everything.

3. Dedicate time to your blog and newsletter - Give each one a unique value proposition and never let them be less of a priority than what you do on Twitter, FB or LinkedIn. Think of any platform you have no control over as a marketing front end to those you own (like blog/newsletter,mail list, etc.)

When I first joined Yahoo!, I spent time with then CEO Tim Koogle. He started out at Motorola, where there were countless stories about founder Paul Galvin. One of them is relevant here. Koogle told me about one of Galvin's early businesses that made battery eliminators (for radios, etc.). There was a transition time when AC power (wall plug in) was being installed into homes, but appliances still ran on batteries. Galvin's company made the incremental adaptor solution.

Galvin went out of business, though. The appliance makers (Maytag to RCA) offered an electrical cord as part of the device and designed batteries out. Galvin was disintermediated! Koogles point: Always own your relationship with your clients, lest you get cutoff out of the blue. Get it?

Posted at 12:35 PM in Business Trends , Marketing , Social Media | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Very good question raised. I think it also raises the eyebrow concerning the type of support one can expect from many of the social outlets across the web.

Posted by: Anthony | September 19, 2010 at 06:37 PM

Very good question & one I never thought about before. But when I did think about it I realized I would be okay. I let my people know in my tweets, FB status updates, and on my books site and my blog that they NEED to get on my newsletter list to keep up with this lusty chick.

So if I lost my Twitter followers I could send out a mailing to my list and gain many of them back. I also know where I found most of them and that would take care of the rest. I have a rabidly loyal Twitter following, so the minute I started tweeting that I had lost followers they would spread the word by RTing it for me.

But this is a fab question. Thanks for making me think about this. You rock! And I just bookmarked your blog. ;)

Posted by: Laura Stamps, Paranormal Erotica Novelist | August 30, 2010 at 04:28 PM

Loved this Tim. Very helpful.

Posted by: Daniel Decker | August 21, 2010 at 07:47 PM