Instinctively, my answer is no.
The growing popularity and virility of Twitter has confirmed my answer. While personal interaction with content and medieval forms of social media have existed since the early days of the internet, it was the debut of networks like Blogger, Xanga, and MySpace that fueled the social media revolution. These networks allowed users to have their own space on the internet. They provided a platform for people to show themselves off to the entire universe. Given such a large audience, it is no wonder why everyone has the desire to be widely known and recognized. This drove many to add hundereds and thousands of friends on the various social networks, and tirelessly promote themselves in hopes that they would become famous. This shameless self-promotion was only the beginning. Soon after the creation of these social networks, software and scripts were created to add friends and followers automatically.
Social Media success is not typically measured by content and value. While content and value may lead to success, social media success is ultimately measured by an amount of friends, RSS subscribers, comments, followers, or re-tweets. You may try to deny that you want all of these followers, but secretly you know that you have read your fair share of blog posts and eBooks that show you techniques of how the “experts” snagged 19,000 Twitter followers in three days, or 1500 RSS readers in a week. While most of the popular people on twitter, facebook and in blogosphere (with the exception of a few) have achieved their numerical success with good and valuable content, new bloggers and social media users have yet to realize it. No report, eBook, or blog post you read will tell you that the key to success is value. They will tell you to comment like crazy, and follow to get followed back. The concept is, in metaphorical terms, social media prostitution.
I wanted to title this post – how I got 230 new twitter followers in 8 months. Organic growth does take a long time. Am I concerned with gaining scads of new followers? No, although I would not mind it. I follow who I want to because of the value that they give to me with each tweet and blog post. I don’t follow all of my followers back for the same reason. I comment on other blogs when it is appropriate and I have something of value to add to the discussion, not to gain just one more click-through to my website. Organic growth is a difficult and long process, and is largely unencouraged by the fast paced and numbers focused social media-sphere.
Until I go viral…
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