You see it all the time on Facebook and Twitter…
‘Please RT and help me get to 1,000 followers’ or ‘Share this and help me get to 500 likes’
You can even buy followers and likes on Twitter and Facebook to inflate your numbers these days with cheap, online services.
But, do the numbers themselves really matter?
It can be a nice boost to the ego to have thousands of twitter followers and if you have a site where you’re looking for advertising or sponsors, the big numbers may help you secure this - although, I’m sure companies would be checking out your lists before committing to a spend and it’s pretty easy to tell when the numbers have been artificially inflated.
If you’re using your social media profiles to attract new work or sell your Illustrated goodies, it’s far better to grow a genuine, responsive audience (even if this is a slower process) than to boost your numbers with spam likes or followers.
We only decided to create a zero2illo Twitter profile when we ran the first zero2illo LIVE event in November and it has grown quite slowly with only 200 or so followers, but I know those followers are genuine ones, interested in the Illustration-based info and inspiration tweets we share, rather than just being there to make up the numbers.
It’s tempting to want to look like the big cheese on social media with massive numbers, but ask yourself this ‘does it *really* help you to achieve your goals or is it just an ego boost’?