The idea of having enormous amounts of social followers or fans is one that marketers look at with mouths agape, being that the more fans one has, the further their reach can extend. As everyone has seen in the past, there are many marketers in the digital world today that will do just about anything to get these fans, and often it turns out in a backfire. One would think that there is only a certain point that can be reached in essentially paying for fans and followers, where it eventually switches from helpful to irrelevant. In a recent personal experiment, the CEO of one of the more well-known companies in advertising, KBS+, took it upon herself to find out just what paying to gain fans can do.
Lori Senecal, who leads the way over at KBS+, decided to look further into the question, “Can money buy you love?” as she stated it in her recent article on AdAge. Being that she already had a lot of experience with Twitter, this was the social platform she decided to use for her experiment.
At the beginning, Senecal had tied to her Twitter account somewhere near 1,500 Twitter followers, each of which was gained through everyday Tweeting, just as anyone on Twitter would gain followers. Over a four year span using the network, Senecal says she has only Tweeted upward of 480 times, therefore making the gaining of these followers a slow but worthwhile process.
The experiment was performed to figure out what the difference would be between the normal rate and quantity at which followers were being gained and the rate and quantity after paying for a campaign to promote an account.
Senecal reported that in a few hours after starting her promoted account campaign, she gained 29 followers, the equivalent to what she would add in any given month. Some hours later, the morning after starting the campaign, the number of new followers was up to 52. After 24 hours had passed, she writes that the number was at 102 followers. The entire campaign cost a whopping $75, and resulted in 217 new followers in the 72 hour period of the experiment.
She writes,
It was kind of like a blind date. Twitter acting as the dating service that makes the introduction, by placing my account in front of users who otherwise might never discover me.
What I learned was that you could buy dates and some of those dates could turn into relationships. But like any relationship, time will tell whether or not there’s true staying power, and that has everything to do with the quality of the time spent together. Engaging with your followers on Twitter (or any social network for that matter) is just like a relationship: what you get out of it is directly proportionate to what you put into it – quality, content and conversation – consideration of your partner’s interests – honesty and respect.
Basically, it comes down to what the real purpose of promoting Twitter accounts is. One should not use paid services to gain followers in a non-genuine fashion, but rather to make their name known, so that great relationships with consumers can be built.
