The Reason We Really Care About Friends, Followers, and Subscribers

The social web is without question is full of people who are endless self promoters trying to draw attention to their content in an effort to make some cash. What it is wrong with that? This is part of the attitude that has help build the United States. However, I don’t think that most people that are active in social media are out to cash in, I believe most just really enjoy the interaction and sense of community.

Recently I have noticed people commenting about their number of friends, followers and subscribers who have no money making interest tied to them. Meaning they want more blog readers, but have no advertising, aren’t selling services, and don’t have any way to profit from additional subscribers.

So why the hell  do they care?

Progress

People are investing their time participating and they want to know that they are doing a good job. They want to feel like a valuable part of the community they serve. The easiest, but certainly not the best way to do this is to look at if the number of people they engage with goes up.

People want to be the best at what they do and friends, followers, and subscribers are the metrics we have given them to judge this. So get down from your soap box the next time you are condemning someone for caring about the number of twitter followers they have. Really they are trying to judge how well they are tweeting and sharing and that is a good thing for everyone.  It is all about progress…