Are You A Hard Person to Friend, Fan or Follow on the Social Networks?

You want more friends, fans and followers on facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and the other social networks – right?

Of course you do – silly! So why make it hard for people to add you to their circles, friends or fan pages?

Here are some quick tips to grow your social networks and increase your Klout scores.

What’s in a name – plenty! Would you follow back someone who’s name has several offensive words like the “N” word in it? What if you publicly respond to that person, than the “N” word is in your public feed for all to see. Not to mention, what kind of idiot refers to themself in such terms?!?! I don’t follow back these morons, and judging from their lack of followers, most don’t either. Avoid using swear words, derogatory language or suggestive slang in your online handles at all costs.

Don’t make following you a typing test. Computer security experts tell us to make our passwords complex long strings of letters, numbers and symbols to make it hard for others to break into our accounts. However ___r$ndman042K$lLeR may be great for a password, for social network name you’ll make few friends. Is that two or three underscores before the name? 

A picture is worth a thousand followers. Just as you shouldn’t use offensive language in your online handle, a rude, offensive, or questionable image for your avatar will also scare away potential followers. Sex may sell, but if you go too far you’ll be wondering why no one is following you.

Content is King. Before I follow back someone, I check out some of a person’s posts to see what it is I’m subscribing too. If all I see are meaningless quotes, or blatant sales pitches to increase my followers, I don’t add that person. Having a good mix of useful, interesting and engaging content encourages me to follow someone. And it isn’t hard to have interesting content – often just talking with your current friends and followers will produce that. We are talking about the SOCIAL networks here, so it’s not a bad idea to actually TALK to people. Having links to blogs like this, or your own blogs also helps. Sharing content from your other social network sites among them not only provides a source for content, but grows your followers too, because if someone likes your tweets, they are bound to like your posts.

Beggars can’t be choosers. I hate people who beg me to follow me, or use the Follow-For-Follow (F4F) attempt to gain followers. You know those tweets or posts that show up in your stream as “@heydude707 f4f me” or Followback. If you check out their friend/follower ratio, you’ll usually see that they follow back less than half of those who are following them. I ignore, and in some instances have blocked people that continue to pester me with these pleas. Don’t beg for attention, make me WANT to give it to you.

Follow Back to be followed. I’m not the only one that checks the friend/follower ratio – many others do too. If you don’t have a decent balance of friends to followers, I’m thinking that you may stop following me, or not follow me back, so why bother adding you? I’m not saying follow everyone – from this post you’ll know I certainly don’t. But follow those who seem like good, genuine people that have followed you.

It’s all about You. Although everyone is trying to monetize their online presence, don’t obviously be all about the dollar. I’ll follow business profiles, but only if their feeds show a real person posting real content. Remember – it’s all about the content. If all the posts are about the company’s products or services, or asking me to check out their website, I ignore ‘em like a kid given broccoli for desert. Sweeten the deal, give me interesting posts which I can share with my social networks, and I’ll follow you back in a quick mouse-click.