How many social media followers is enough?

A client recently told me that their company’s year-old Twitter account had attracted about 50 followers, and asked, in my opinion, in the great scheme of things, was that “any good”? I guess they were thinking that this didn’t appear to be very impressive, that maybe by now the company would have Stephen Fry-like levels of influence, and that maybe it was all a waste of time. I asked two questions in reply. Firstly, how much time did the company spend on its Twitter presence? And secondly, how many genuine customers or prospects could they identify were “following” them?

The answer to the first question was “no time at all”. The company just had all of its new website content posted automatically to Twitter, and it did nothing else. Social media experts will tell you this is a waste of time, to which I reply: “how can you waste no time at all?” The answer to the second question was “one or two, but we can’t really tell” (which is perfectly normal – you can’t tell how many, if any genuine customers or prospects are on the circulation of a trade magazine, for example, but it wouldn’t stop you wanting coverage there).

So… you’re getting regular messages out to “one or two” worthwhile people, for no cost and no effort? Sounds like you’re on to a winner there. It might not be a big win, but it would be more worthy of discussion if you’d spent £10,000 on social media initiatives and were trying to work out if the 500 regular followers justified the expense. Twitter is free, it provides links to your website, and the content can be found by search engines and by customers using them. Why wouldn’t you use it? Of course, the more effort you put in, the more you’ll get out of it, but it seems to me to deliver a return on investment, however tiny, from day one, and there’s not much else which does that.