In this video, I rant about the “gaming” of social networking platforms such as Twitter after playing around with ReFollow for a few days – a free web app that allows you to allegedly ‘manage’ your Twitter relationships effectively.

Although it does provide some useful feature for the ethical social media purist, it just seems to me like a spammer’s wet dream. But how come I’m still drawn to using it in order to bloat up my follower count and reach people that may be interested in what I have to offer here on Not A Pro Blog?

An excellent article on Dosh Dosh earlier this year shows why you don’t need to mass follow users and discusses the growing number of products for Twitter marketing such as ReFollow:

These products give you the same blueprint: just get more twitter followers. All you need to do is to follow many users everyday, drop non-mutuals and then follow more. Repeat until you get a ton of followers and look like a social media rockstar. If people follow you, you must be awesome, right?

Surely, I can agree with their sarcastic tone… but is it really that far off the mark?

No matter how you try to deflect the issue, we’re still living in a day and age where the number of people who ‘know’ you directly affects your perceived value to others. Of course, you can truly believe in your mind that it doesn’t weigh in to your decisions one bit, but you’d be lying to yourself because it’s just human nature. It’s not only an online phenomenon either:

• Politics: third-party candidates are often called “fringe” players solely because of the small amount of influence they have, not on the basis of their platform or viewpoints.
• Hollywood: actors & actresses are broken down into “A-lister” and “B-lister” status solely based on their popularity at the box office, not on the merits of their work.
• Music industry: artists are still looked down at as ‘indie’ or ‘underground’ if they’re not in mainstream radio rotation regardless of their talent or unique sound.

I’m quite positive that tools such as ReFollow, other marketing applications, badge creators, subscriber counters, and so forth wouldn’t get used much or exist at all without relying on the fact that someone’s perception of you changes due to the amount of people it looks like you can influence. Do you agree or disagree?

What goes through *your* mind when you see someone with only a few followers, friends, fans or subscribers?