I am very active on social media sites and I see the value of connecting with like minded people. What I find many people are doing today, and let’s take Twitter and Facebook as a good example, is connecting to as many people as possible and announcing to the world they have 5,000 plus followers, connections etc. Well good for you! Now what are you going to do with thos people?

The purpose of connecting with anyone at all is mainly to get to know them, build a relationship and see how you can help them, or they can help you. Before you run away at the word – help – think about it in a non business respect. Remember when you were a student at school or college and you were the new girl or boy and you wanted to make friends and also, you wanted to be popular. I am almost positive you did not run up to everyone and state your name, where you lived, and then asked them to help you with your homework  or drive you home from school or even buy you lunch. What I think you did do is ask if you could hang out with them, slowly listen and learn and get to know them, and work out who you did want to be friends with and who you did not. Obviously if you are super popular you are friend with everyone, but juggling school, part time work, eating and sleeping probably means a lot of your friends did not get your attention 100% of the time. Once you had built up a relationship with other students you would have friends in your inner circle you wanted to help, either with homework or even a ride home from school. But, once in a while you would come across someone who needed your help who was not exactly a best friend, but you felt you could help because they were good students and you liked helping others. You may even have found that by helping others you could be deemed as an influencer at school and may even become Head Girl or join clubs at school in a leadership capacity.

Flip this scenario over to the world of social media networking, and imagine you are friends with 1,000 or more people on FB or Twitter, how much time would it take you to connect with them all, via a phone call, email or a word or two on twitter in private message? Not possible, not if you are working the social media sites properly, and know why and how to be successful and how to use these sites as a tool and not let them become like a rock around your neck dragging you down!

Now I am not saying don’t connect with as many people as you want, what I am saying is don’t go around bragging like you bagged a new trophy, people are people and we all like to be thought of as special and not part of the herd so to speak. So you announce you have 1,000 followers, what will this give you? how do they know who you are, what you do, how can you help them all? By all means bag as many trophy followers as you like but long term you could end up with nothing, the same as you started. People are latching on to this pretty quickly and choosing not to connect to just for numbers.

I have a lot of followers on Twitter and not quite so many on other social media sites, this is a calculated decision and I know my reasons and the whys and wherefores.

Enjoy your trophies on your wall:)