Twitter, Social Media
The Pain and Joy of Losing 9,000 Followers
The metaphor of rebuilding a burnt house
We, humans, experience pain and joy in the big spectrum of a wavy emotional ocean manifesting and constantly fluctuating in our lives with ebbs and flows. This unique experience makes us human.
For example, for me, it is a great joy to be able to re-amplify inspiring articles from insightful writers, thought leaders, and influencers, reaching out a broader audience. One of the important parts of content development is being able to communicate it to the right audience at the right time.
Mixed feelings and thoughts
This is a story with mixed emotions and thoughts about a particular social media tool. More specifically, Twitter! Bear with me till the end to understand the order behind my madness.
Let me give you a quick background.
I enjoyed social media from the very beginning of the Internet. In fact, I was one of the Internet developers and contributors to the development of new protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP, and ICP in academic, military, and government networks in those days. The Internet was a playground for my boyhood. I had many sleepless nights and lost time concepts on those days.
In the beginning, around 2006, I tried every available social network but was hesitant about Twitter for some unknown emotional reasons. It simply did not gel with me.
After many compelling reasons imposed on me by friends and colleagues, I decided to join in Twitter in 2008. Since then I am on Twitter, gained recently around 9K followers.
In my first year, I gained 5,000 followers who found me from other social networks, international conferences, and collaboration networks. I was not very active. For some reasons, I emotionally felt disconnected from Twitter.
I focused on other platforms such as LinkedIn. I have 24K+ professional followers on LinkedIn and truly enjoy the experience. For example, I haven’t received abusive or spammy messages on LinkedIn so far.
Until I joined Medium, I did not see much value in Twitter. However, as soon as I discovered the Medium Twitter account, I had an instant epiphany. Through the Medium Twitter account, I came across fascinating articles and met terrific writers. This inspired me to read their articles and re-tweet the articles I read and enjoyed. This activity created serendipitous encounters. This was the key reason for my recent Twitter engagement.
This new use case for Twitter was wonderful.
I enjoyed amplifying the articles of Medium writers to my 9K followers on Twitter. They were retweeting and the messages were reaching out to thousands of potential readers.
During that time, I also read a book by Mark Schaefer, titled The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time.
Mark is an insightful and experienced author in content marketing. His book inspired me to reevaluate and reconsider Twitter. In fact, I reviewed one of Mark’s book in an article.
Mark made Twitter so compelling for me that I re-engaged on Twitter intensively using the techniques I learned from this great book.
This learning was good and bad at the same time.
I followed everyone who followed me with no discrimination as if following the advice from Rumi :
“ Come, come, whoever you are. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come even if you have broken your vow a thousand times, Come, yet again, come, come.“.
Suddenly, my followers reached 9K in one month. I knew some of those accounts were fake but the good thing, I was amplifying my messages to a bigger audience.
From one angle, social media follower size is not very important to me. It is a kind of vanity. I am not into bragging about being followed by 1M or so like some celebrities. Having said that, I admire Lady Gaga, who is followed by millions, as one of my creative inspirations.
My only reason for having a reasonably large network is to be able to convey my important messages to diverse sets of groups in multiple geographies. For example, in practical sense, reaching 10% of my followers is a good value proposition in my content marketing desires. In my case, this equates to 900 people out of 9000.
The perception of being followed by many may create a nice feeling for but my emotional logic did not feel good about Twitter. I cannot say I hate it but you know what I mean.
The bad thing, I was receiving a myriad of spam messages and risky links via DM on Twitter. DM is a risky feature on Twitter. From my understanding, most of the Twitter security issues are caused by this DM which stands for Direct Message.
For example, in one case, I received a message from a reliable friend. I thought he sent the link to me because it was from his account with a friendly note. I clicked on the harmless-looking link and it suddenly duplicated itself in 9K followers in a foreign language. It was a cleverly designed script. I accepted my fault on this and took personal responsibility. Even the best steed sometimes stumbles.
The experience was painful. I had to apologize to thousands of followers who got back to me with a question mark. It was an embarrassing experience. As a security-aware person, I was ashamed of myself for a moment. But it was an excellent lesson. I stopped using the DM feature. I don’t recommend it unless there is a good reason to use it. We need to be cautious with the use of DM.
There is a tremendous amount of social engineering activities using DM. Every day many fake accounts “DMed” me with unbelievable excuses aiming to collect my personal details and even directly asking for donations with reasons such as they have only three months to live due to fatal cancer.
These were not the only bad experiences I have had. There were the worst parts. I warned you, in the beginning, I have mixed feelings and thoughts about Twitter.
The initial worst part of the experience was related to my new followers. Within my new followers, there were some fake accounts causing malicious attacks. Unfortunately, my account had security alarms in the Twitter ecosystem and naturally (I mean artificial intelligently) was suspended by Twitter. Twitter sent me an email to defend my account and provide details for verification. I agreed and complied.
The second worst part of the experience, Twitter did not respond back to my emails. They provided no response, no support. I gave them my email and phone number to re-activate my account but unfortunately I did not receive response from Twitter. I felt ignored.
I still have empathy for Twitter administration and give the benefit of the doubt that they may be very busy dealing with millions of fake accounts and many security attacks every day.
However, as a long term user of the platform, I was expecting at least some acknowledgement indicating that they were working on it. No response is bad customer service. Who knows maybe Twitter does not see the users as customers unless they are sponsored.
Some of my friends called Twitter Pandora’s box and some called a can of worm. I did not pay attention to these metaphors before, but now, they make a better sense to me.
Anyway…
Life goes on.
Past is past but there are good lessons learned.
Here are a few key lessons learned that I want to share with you.
Social media appears to be ephemeral, unreliable, and not trustworthy.
For example, losing 12 years of followers in one second bring us to a new perspective in life. It is not easy to rebuild it. It can create a strong emotion of disappointment at the individual level. However, as usual, I was prepared emotionally, considering the disappointing experiences we had in the past related to some prominent networks such as MySpace, SecondLife, etc.
There are several disadvantages of using Twitter which I want to discuss in another article. I cannot deny the benefits either.
The joy of creating good news
Considering the compelling points from Mark’s book, as an action, I created a new Twitter account with the same details just changing the account ID.
In short time I gained many followers who recognized me immediately in the platform. With this achievement, my sadness, disappointment, frustration, and annoyance turned into joy. It was as if I started rebuilding my burned house.
In reality, there is no way for me to access the accounts of previous followers. Twitter does not help. I lost hope in Twitter support. However, my capability to explore new insights motivates me to reinvent and reconstruct my relationships. This adventure creates a natural joy.
My aim is to find some valuable old followers and regain new followers. At least I have a good network spread across multiple social networks. I know powerful engagement methods and techniques to reach out to new connections in other networks.
Another reflection from this learning is we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket.
From a security measurement perspective, one of my online mentors Evan Kirstel recommends permission to apps for anything that we are 100% familiar with. Evan also highlighted the importance of having two-factor authentication to further secure Twitter.
With these invaluable lessons, I aim to create a more quality follower base on Twitter. One of my practical approaches is to set criteria based on my values and to apply them for manifestation.
It is time to reactivate my LinkTree profile in other social media accounts as explained here. You can connect me to other accounts using LinkTree for insights and potential collaboration.
Conclusion
I feel like rebuilding a smaller yet more beautiful house. Who knows, with time, it may end up a bigger and stronger house with your support.
The first reason for me to write this article was to share my pain turning into joy. It can be refreshing to share thoughts, emotions, and plans with a community of readers and writers in this platform. Extending thoughts can generate new synergies among writers and readers.
I am excited to be able to retweet Medium articles and continue exploring new content and discover new writers in this fascinating community. I am truly thrilled about this experience.
I would be delighted to be followed via my new twitter account and I will follow back. Promise! My new Twitter account has been renamed to @DigitalMehmet.
I also created two Twitter lists.
The purpose of this list is to share my content and other writers’ content with a selected group of people. Mark Schaefer highly recommends the use of the selected list due to its value and practicality for content sharing and marketing.
In the end, there is a silver lining in every cloud. With this new experience, I feel more resilient about social media use. These types of experiences help us grow and gain more maturity in life. We move from survival to thriving mode.
Here is another sour social media experience.
This is what happened to one of my publications.
I want to link a similar story from a writer (Gareth Willey) who had an interesting experience with Twitter. This story is full of lessons from a social media addiction perspective. I highly recommend this story to all my readers.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
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