One thing that bugs me about Twitter is that the term followers, the people who elect to see your microblogging updates, sounds like a cross between a group of zombies and a collection of cultish fanatics that you might want to keep at arm’s length. We use other terms like friend, contact, colleague, and buddy to refer to these different kinds of people who pay attention to what you do and say.
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A lot of people (including both you and me?) like the idea of building up these follower numbers for several reasons. It can come across as being selfish, ego driven, or manipulative. Or, with a more positive spin, maybe you’re just looking for a group of great people to share stuff with. Maybe you feel you’ve got important things to say THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW.
Many social media users (including bloggers) are looking to build up an audience, composed of these same friends, followers, contacts, etc. You will almost inevitably build up an audience of some size by creating decent content (if not better) AND by networking or socializing. The better you are at one or another of these skills, the bigger your audience will become.
What is the real purpose of an audience, though? What makes us worthy of attracting the attention of dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people?
The short answer is value, but in a way that’s a cop out. Value is something that’s important to someone. If I deliver value by writing a blog post, I’m delivering something to you that is important to you. That value can come in many forms:
- monetary wealth
- productivity
- useful knowledge
- intrinsic worthiness through great design or meaning
For the purposes of this post, let’s put value into three categories, based on the recipient of this value:
Knowledge: I can deliver raw knowledge to you in the form of facts and undocumented links or I can put additional intelligence behind this data to make it more meaningful for you
Entertainment/experience: I can try to make you laugh, cry, angry, horrified, or just plain try to make you think about something that you’ve never thought before. All the blog’s a stage with a shifting cast of performers and portrayers, after all.
Acts: I can go beyond the above by giving you something tangible in the form of a tangible product or a service which I put effort and other resources into to achieve some result.
If a content creator isn’t delivering any of the above, then they really have no right to an audience.
How do you deserve an audience?
You serve the audience. You provide service. You do things for that audience.
You can receive things in return for this service and that’s perfectly fine. You can receive attention, goodwill, gifts in kind, even financial renumeration. You’ve got to provide service (the method for delivering value) to the people who sign up to pay attention to you.
You don’t serve me; I serve you. I try to have fun and to get something from the experience, but my focus has to be on you. I make the best decisions that I can about how to serve you at any given point in time wherever I’m a social media user. I won’t always be right. Occasionally I will indulge in one of my favorite interests, but I will always try to make that valuable to you in some fashion, either through:
- increasing your knowledge about a topic
- creating a rewarding experience from you
- performing some act of service
If I can stay on this track, then I think things will be fine here.
I’m going to continue to work on growing the audience size here and in other locations. Despite whatever personal satisfaction that I get out of it, I’m really just trying to make my corner of the world a little better.
If you are a content creator and you’re struggling to get an audience, or make it bigger, are you sure that you’re providing value? Think about it.
By the way, I think this is a key to success at almost anything you do.
I don't know, but I don't think Twitter is a good place to look for an “audience.” The majority of the Twitter users I have encountered have a really short attention span. They seem a little bipolar. One minute they're angry about something, the next they're eating a sandwich.
I have a couple of thoughts on this:
1. Although I used Twitter as an example in this post, it's just one example. People cluster together in lots of places.
2. If you look at my Twitter stream you'll certainly see a mixed bag of entries, so I might fall into that bipolar terminology that you mention. And that's fine with me: my Twitter microblog has fewer rules around it than Broadcasting Brain. At the same time, however, I'm still trying to inform or at least entertain.
I don't think we should measure the deservance (is that a word?) of an audience based on value. Value is subjective and varies from person to person.
Here's what I think:
I deserve an audience because I have a message to share. I deserve an audience because I am saying something.
Whether people take action, are influenced, or make changes based on my message is irrelevant.
Every person in this world deserves to be heard, even if the audience is of one.
Fair points, but does this innate right to be heard really demand the need for an audience of more than one?
I have a slightly different take on this, I guess. In a way, I *don't* feel deserving of an audience — Who am I, really? It's not that I have serious self-esteem issues.. rather, I feel that folks have a lot of choices of sources of information, so I start by feeling grateful that I (or my blog or publication, or whatever) is on their radar at all.
If I start there, it makes me work harder to keep giving freely — information, or service, or time, or attention, or a laugh, or whatever I can offer on any given day. To me, this philosophy is the cornerstone of creating good content and buiding an audience.
Hi Ann. Your concept of gratefulness does go hand in hand about what I'm saying about providing value in various forms. I do make the assumption that the content creator has something valuable to say AND they are competing against other creators, especially if your content falls into one of those more popular (and populated) niches.
The only major difference that I see in what you've written vs. what I did was your emphasis on treating the audience as a privilege.
And you're right about that!
Or maybe you think like me; you either stay or you don't. I do small amounts of promotional stuff, but on the whole, I don't “sell” Blah.
Why? Because as intimated — if rather circuitously — in this article, you can only provide a venue. You can't fill all of the seats. The decision to stay is down to the people visiting. If that transforms into a community, then you're fortunate.
I've read of many discussions on this topic and the “key” to success is very much a contextual one, tied in some way to the nature of the blog and its audience to which it serves.
As I said, I don't sell. I write…
And to each their own, your methods must be working for you, Wayne. However, if you're not providing an experience that meets at least one need, they won't stick around. You can't anticipate all needs and attempt to serve all needs. However, and the point that I didn't explicitly say in the post, if you do completely narcissistic, self-serving stuff, you likely won't keep your readers around. And if you are OK with that, that's fine, it's just something to consider.
[...] year ago today I wrote a post called how to deserve an audience. The point of the post was to talk about what you as a blogger, social media user, or whatever, [...]