Fast Followers
Your social networking channels like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are a super niche equivalent of your local paper.
It would have a circulation of so many readers who follow the content fed out in the paper daily or weekly.
Your local newspaper monetizes by selling ad space to businesses wanting to put a message in front of their audience.
What they charge for ad space is determined by that newspapers distribution.
In the modern media a distribution run is the same as a subscriber list.
Instead of content going out daily or weekly it can go out every minute and rather than having to transfer links or phone numbers from the newspaper manually, modern media has click to read, subscribe, view maps, buy or click to call making the transition from one content source to another seamless.
Quality or Quantity of Followers
You will hear a lot of debate about the virtues of building a quality audience to follow you on social networking platforms.
How important it is to engage that audience, communicate and engage them.
That simply gathering followers for followers sake without slowing down enough to engage them is not an effective method of online marketing.
In March last year the Economist published a piece entitled "Primates on Facebook" that described research done by the Facebook data team.
This research proved the larger a following on social media, the less mutual or two way interaction there is between follower and "the followed".
The Actual Numbers Showed:
Girls who have an average following of 50 did little more than maintain relationships with 20% of their followers.
They maintain one way relationships with a further 12% and engaged in mutual, two way relationships with less than 8%.
Males were a couple of percentage points behind females and when it came to people who had 500 followers these numbers more than halved.
Now this isn't at all surprising. Let's face it we know the name of our dog and if we had 3 dogs we would know the names of all of them. But what if we owned 100 dogs.
At What Point Do We Stop Seeing Our Followers in Social Media as Real People
What upsets you more?
Your childhood best friend dying or a dozen kids across the other side of the world dying in a bus crash?
David Wong, in his book, The Monkey Sphere, writes how human beings are hardwired to have drastic double standards for the people inside our circle of trust (Our Monkey Sphere as David puts it) and the rest of the world who are outside of our personal circle of trust.
Gladwell's book the Tipping point estimated the number of people a person will know in a lifetime ranges between 300 and 3000.
Peter Marsden's study found that in the US, the average number of people who the population can discuss important matters with is 3.