Where Have all the Followers gone?

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary , whose name popped into my mind this morning as I discarded yet another email alert from Twitter: “Joe Blogs is now following you on Twitter!”, with an exclamation mark to get me all excited.

DELETE.

But it made me think of how frequently I receive these email alerts, and Management Measures , so I waded back through my email folders (I have a folder for each month’s emails, “Trash201110, Trash201109, Trash201108 etc.” and made a quick tally of emails announcing my Devoted Followers:

		Cumulative
Mar	14	14
Apr	22	36
May	11	47
Jun	20	67
Jul	25	92
Aug	23	115
Sep	33	148
Oct	20	168
Current		52

Now I had also received by email twitters statistics for the merry week of this, and in it I noted “Followers=51; Growth this week=2; Prediction next week=49”, and leaving behind the question of why a growth of 2 this week might lead to fewer followers next week, I pondered why, after 168 announcements of followers, I have retained only 30% of the camp.

The rest have de-camped, it seems.

“BeerGuy”, “SexyTeen” and “DeadMeat” along with them, I hope.

Twitter, of course, never sends me an email lamenting the loss of a follower, only another young hopeful who has been led to believe that by following me they’ll look good and land that multi-million dollar contract.

“Give up!”, is my message. I’m having enough trouble as it is landing a multi-thousand dollar contract, let alone boosting total strangers to vast riches.

How about you?

How many followers have you attracted and lost, and do you care?

Talk to Me !