“Hello, you are worth NOTHING to us. Thank you for using our services.”
I had some close calls with social media metrics somewhat early on. When I went on Twitter, I believed that I needed to keep my profile public to gain any followers I could, spam accounts or not. But then I realized, what am I doing? I am stressed out all the time, worried and constantly disappointed when I see that my friends have over a hundred followers and I only had 20. I wondered how I could get more, I became obsessed. But that’s when I realized, I needed to stop. I wasn’t a number, I’m not some big celebrity or some sort of company. I am just me and wanted to use Twitter to keep up with the news.
I felt very stressed and that’s when I knew, privatizing my accounts was the best way to do it. Not to mention, stop looking at your numbers and others’ numbers. The only accounts I keep public are the accounts I use to manage my personal brand and my portfolios.
If I look at numbers, I do so for people I don’t know and don’t have envy towards. I mainly only check to figure out what type of level that person or company is at. By that I mean, if I am dealing with a public figure, I check the follower count to ensure that it is the correct person, especially if they don’t have a “verified” badge on their account for whatever reason. For companies, it is a good gauge of what type of company they are or what stage their at. For instance, if it is a start up company I am looking at, looking at the number of followers and the types of followers they have will give me a good idea of the possible success of the company or the current success of it now. Keeping that in mind, I can figure out if I want to follow them or not and if they are worth keeping an eye on, especially if they are tech companies.
Keeping these in mind, I think it would do well for us to keep in mind, we are not our numbers. The minute we start counting followers, posts, etc, we become a brand, a company, not ourselves. If that is what you want to achieve then that is the right path, but assuming that this is about a personal account, then stop counting numbers, start looking at the posts you are making. Are they genuine to you? Are they what you want to see? Are you making these for you? If you are saying no, if you say that you are posting these photos for others and trying to get views from them, trying to get followers, then you may just want to start a separate page for that alone.
Numbers shouldn’t tell us how we succeed in our normal lives. It should not measure how much my life is valued or how much my day is worth sharing. If I looked at how little followers I have, 77 to be exact, then I would have no self-esteem when I look at my friend who has well over 100. But I don’t know the number to compare, I don’t look at it because even if they get over 100 likes on their photos, it doesn’t mean anything, people like it because they just like everything on their feeds, not because they actually enjoy the content their friends are posting. When I get that one or two likes, it is because my friends actually enjoy the photos I share. That to me, is more important then if the whole world was following.
