My Mastodon feed has seen an uptick in posts on the alternative social media site Bluesky. It all comes down to the search for followers. The logic says more people on Bluesky equals more followers. With people migrating from X following the U.S. Election, numbers are rapidly increasing as does the pressure to be where everyone else.
Henrik Karlsson1 resonates strongly with the idea that write honestly about that which is important and those with similar interests will find you. If it works for blogging, it also works for whatever social media platform you are on.
“A contact list of more than 200-300 people is not a network. It’s a marketing list” (Roy Sheppard, 1999)
The platform followers who chase numbers across platforms are trying to build marketing lists and not networks. I see the same with LinkedIn. It’s simply not possible to interact directly and meaningfully with more than 200 people.
Are you building a network or a marketing list? Personally, I’d rather have a smaller list with good conversation than a larger list with silence.
Footnotes
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Karlsson (2022), A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox ↩