I’ve been posting to Twitter, a Facebook Page, MeWe, YouMe Social, Tumblr, Hubzilla, Friendica, Mastodon, and other networks for the last year since the demise of Google+. My Google+ Group had over 500,000 followers when it shut down so I thought I’d see how it goes across the various networks with the same type of posts and try and work out where the growth is and why (from a networks point of view).
Today my Technology and Gadgets Group on MeWe passed 10,000 followers after 14 months after starting out at zero. I don’t promote the group anywhere or spend any time inviting people to join the group. I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last week and realised there are two main factors at play:
1. The social network itself must have a critical mass of users as a small network with say 2,000 users is not going to garner anyone 10,000 followers.
2. But the key difference is a network that has a central directory showing categories of interests for people to find whether it be knitting, cat photos or technology. Google+ had this and so does MeWe.
So apart from following celebrities or family/friends (latter being limited numbers) the other big thing people seem to seek is something that interests them and that stays on that topic (focus without the spam). Obviously not all topics are equal either as my other Groups don’t have these numbers.
Like with Google+ though I did not allow general posting in my group apart from replies and comments to posts. I did experiment briefly with allowing posts but quickly found myself spending more time moderating spam than finding interesting content to post.
I just want to say a big thank you to my 10,006 followers on this group in MeWe (https://www.youme.social/groups/view/497/technology-and-gadgets) and thank you for keeping it clean and making some insightful comments You can be assured my posts will stay the same and there won’t be any promotions, spam, etc. Just 3 to 5 posts a day on what I find interesting every day related to that group.
However it’s not all roses and sunshine on MeWe as I do still resent the fact that the posts are not truly public, users need to register and login to view the posts. Apart from that, it has good spam reporting, user blocking, etc that seems to work well.
#socialnetworking #blogging #technology
