Having a crowd isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Actually, it depends on the crowd. If you’re Charlie Sheen‘s crowd, you’ve got attention, and that may be kind of cool. Most people though are just watching to see your epic collapse. If you’re Westboro Baptist, you’ve got notability, but nobody in the crowd is really listening to you. Even if you get a ton of web and media traffic, it’s obvious you haven’t made an impact on anyone – you’ve just made people hate you and maybe God too. If you stand on a soap box in the middle of the street, there’s a crowd, but you’re just noise that people ignore.
Twitter is like that. Facebook too. You may have a large audience, and that’s great. Does it mean anything? Maybe. If people follow you on twitter, but don’t talk to you, it may mean very little. Do people even read your stuff? Honestly, if you want a lot of followers, just follow a ton of random people. You’ll get a good amount to follow you back, especially people who use auto-follow. They probably don’t care what you have to say though. You probably don’t care about them. Pretty worthless.
So who are you actually conversing with? What’s the group that you’re revolving around? If you can have a significant relationship with 10 people, it’s way more valuable than having a huge crowd that just doesn’t care. Invest in people, even if there’s no “return”…they’ll begin to care. Maybe people will reciprocate. They usually do. And you can have a group that benefits each other. You can have something that counts – not just a fake voice.
Oh, and if you can build into those 10 people and watch it multiply, then you have a crowd that you can impact in limitless ways.
If you’re interested, here’s another awesome article about this
(Side note – does anyone else know who that picture is and what it’s from?)
