Across the board, I finally learned this lesson: numbers mean nothing but generous, genuine, loving friends, fans, customers and clients mean EVERYTHING.
Largely, I embodied this idea for the last few years. But I finally put the nail in the numbers game coffin from a clear perspective this past Saturday. My main Twitter stream became a news stream. Since I do not follow the news through major media or any outlet, I mass unfollowed 6,000 people in the prior 4 days to stop following the news via Twitter. I shall continue the purge until I get rid of all news tweets or I reach 20-100 people to follow.
One idea slapped me upside the head: 10 years ago as a newbie and many years into my blogging career I followed most people not to form powerful bonds with trusted human beings, but to chase numbers. I deeply believed numbers made you successful because I thought, felt and acted from energies of fear, scarcity and poverty, predominantly.
I followed more people to get more followers because I believed more followers meant more blog traffic and more blogging profits. Nope. Not true. I suffered the reality check years into my blogging career – struggles and failure – but was too scared, ignorant and blind to see the error of my ways.
Do you know what matters? Human beings who:
- engage you genuinely, warmly and kindly on social media, through your blog and through emails
- become loyal customers
- become loyal clients
- become loyal readers
- become loving fans
- become brand advocates
100% of the time, only these folks matter because giving them all attention and energy allows your freedom, happiness and peace of mind to expand. If you run a business, these folks will allow your business to grow if you give all of your attention and energy to these loving, loyal people.
Numbers are worthless, meaningless and pointless because numbers are illusions, not being real. I had 47,000 followers on Twitter before the mass unfollow. A small percentage of human beings among those 47,000 followers:
- @replied me
- retweeted my content
- bought my eBooks
- hired me to coach them
- hired me to write for them
out of those 47,000 people.
Instantly, as I began the mass unfollow, retweets of my eBooks and kind eBook endorsements increased because I gave all of my attention and energy to engaging my @replies versus trying to fish out a kernel of helpful, resonant content from my main stream, to no avail.
I recall seeing someone with 500,000 followers on Twitter who generated 0 to 2 retweets per tweet. Out of the 500,000 number only 2 human beings actually saw enough value to retweet his tweets. Even more telling? He only tweeted a few times daily. I tweet a high volume of tweets daily. But on travel days when I pull back on tweeting I note my 2-3 tweets generate at least 4-5 or perhaps 10 retweets with my 47K followers.
My 47K followers is an illusion because a small collection of human beings out of the 47K number grow my traffic and business. The dude with 500,000 followers created a 500K illusion because only 1 to 2 human beings find his tweets compelling enough to RT one or 2 of his tweets daily. Hey; I have been in his same illusory boat but at least my @replies keep humming along daily because I engage my followers routinely. Hence, the traffic and business growth.
Numbers are worthless because numbers can not do anything and do not mean anything. Make friends with human beings. Help human beings. All happiness, freedom and success in life is befriending, bonding with and serving people, one at a time.
