Why I hate scarcity marketing
A few years back there were a number of accounts that had huge follower growth but did not follow almost anyone back. Ashton Kutcher being a good example of that. This gave birth to the idea of "scarcity marketing." This means, I want everyone to follow me and I will follow nobody. Because I follow nobody, I will therefore be more desirable.
It is an elitist marketing tactic that is horrible advice.
1. Ashton Kutcher was able to do this because he is Ashton Kutcher. He has been building his career in the public eye for a very long time. He already has his "social capital" built up, so people want to follow him. Plus he is known for being funny and off the wall, and his Twitter account followed suite.
2. You are not Ashton Kutcher. Unless you are already a super star, it is not likely that you will get a massive following just because you create a twitter account. Follow people back, it costs you nothing. Follow people first, they are more likely to follow you back.
3. When someone has a lot of followers but is not following anyone back (of very few people), that tells me that they either bought all their followers or that they are pretty anti-social. It lets me know that if I follow them, they are not likely to talk to me so their twitter feed will be more like a newsfeed than a real person.
James Deen's twitter account is like this. I adore James. I am personal friends with him. But he does not talk to people on Twitter, at least not very much. This is why he follows very few people. I follow his account because his tweets are funny, not because he is ever going to have a real conversation with me on the network. Nina Hartley, on the other hand, does follow people and does talk to people. I am friends with Nina in RL too, but she does talk to me on Twitter. She talks to a lot of other people too. In case you are wondering, Nina has a bigger following by about 77K followers.
You do not have to follow a ton of people, but while you are building your account your follower to following count is likely to be closer together while your account grows. As it gets bigger, you following will stay smaller and your follower will grow. But following nobody, or only 2 people, is not a good strategy to build your audience, it just says that you are too good to talk to people.
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