Summary

The article suggests that focusing on building genuine relationships with a core group of 150 followers, based on Dunbar's number, is more effective for personal marketing than pursuing a large, impersonal audience.

Abstract

The concept of Dunbar's number, which posits that individuals can only maintain stable social relationships with around 150 people, is applied to personal marketing strategies in the digital age. The article argues that creatives should concentrate on cultivating deep connections with a dedicated group of followers, who can act as personal evangelists for their work. It emphasizes the importance of quality over quantity in social relationships and suggests that nurturing a core group of 150 champions can lead to organic growth and a sustainable career through word-of-mouth promotion. The article also references Kevin Kelly's theory of 1,000 true fans, which aligns with Dunbar's number as a foundation for success, and criticizes the obsession with mass marketing and large follower counts that often don't translate into meaningful engagement or sales.

Opinions

The author believes that the pursuit of a broad audience is less effective than engaging with a dedicated group of 150 followers who are more likely to become personal evangelists for one's work.
The article suggests that online social networks, including platforms like Medium, are subject to the same cognitive limitations as offline relationships, supporting the application of Dunbar's number in a digital context.
It is argued that the success of personal marketing is not about the number of followers but the depth of the relationship with those followers, with the goal of turning them into true fans.
The author criticizes the common practice of "follow for follow" and accumulating blind leads, stating that these methods do not result in meaningful promotion or support.
The article posits that a focused approach on the initial 150 dedicated followers can lead to exponential growth through their networks, as each person is likely to share their discoveries with others who may also become true fans.
The author emphasizes that direct relationships with fans are crucial for creatives and that these relationships should be nurtured to build a sustainable career, rather than relying on indirect methods of mass marketing.
The article questions the value of large follower counts on platforms like Medium, suggesting that the number of followers does not necessarily correlate with the quality of engagement or the success of one's creative endeavors.
The author encourages creatives to identify and engage with their most interactive followers—those who clap, comment, and share their content—as a strategic approach to personal marketing.
It is implied that by focusing on a personal Dunbar's number, creatives can foster an incentivized community that will support and amplify their work, leading to a more fulfilling and successful career.

What If 150 Fans Are Enough?

The power of Dunbar’s number for focused, personal marketing

We spend so much time growing our lists, increasing our followers, and marketing to the masses, but is it really getting us what we want? Do we really want a broad spectrum of mildly interested users? Or are we really after a connection to a group of personal evangelists? Based on my extrapolation of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory, it’s the latter.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. (Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.” Journal of Human Evolution)

A recent study has suggested that Dunbar’s number is also applicable to online social networks. (Gonçalves, Bruno; Perra, Nicola; Vespignani, Alessandro (3 August 2011). “Modeling Users’ Activity on Twitter Networks: Validation of Dunbar’s Number”. PLoS One) I would suggest that it is just as applicable to personal marketing. That the power of 150 people can be all you need to effectively market yourself if done the right way.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about it at length in chapter five, The Power of Context, of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. When referring to Rebecca Wells and her bestselling book, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, as well as Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, he opines:

“Small close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea.”

Why can’t this theory be applied to personal marketing as well? If Rebecca Wells’ book could start to bloom from the intense dedication of a few local book clubs, why can’t we build fan pods that will do our work for us? Instead of spending so much time creating expansive emails intended to grab any low-hanging fruit on the social media vine, what if we focused on engaging directly with our most established followers?

If, based on Dunbar’s suggestion, the figure of 150 represents the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, is it realistic of us to expect our creative message to be carried onward by more people than that? So why are we worried about blind adds to our mailing list? Why does anyone use a follow for follow theory? Blind leads and social media climbers will not tell a friend about us. The initial group of 150 will.

Personal Marketing

We’ve been overwhelmed with ideologies that tell us we need as many followers as possible to be successful. That more is better. Quantity over quality. Metrics. But the linchpin to all hypergrowth is always in the core. Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans really starts with Dunbar’s number. Think about his description:

“A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living—if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.”

To get to these 1,000 true fans you have to nurture the first 150 champions. Dunbar’s number is the baseline for future success. If you have 150 dedicated and committed readers, ones who have alerts for you turned on, they will eventually spread the message to others as long as the underlying creative content is proven worth it.

So why are we so worried about mass marketing? Do we not trust ourselves enough to allow others to spread our message? For a big business, the erection of a billboard on a highway nets a call. Or a click. Or subliminally reminds us that it’s important. But for us, the creative, we don’t need a billboard. It won’t help us.

We need 150 people willing to tell one friend about us. Next thing we know, we have 300 people. If they each tell one person, we have 600. It works because people usually recommend creatives to people they know will love them. We are two rungs down, and we are almost at 1,000 true fans. But Kevin Kelly reminds us that “direct fans are best. The number of True Fans needed to make a living indirectly inflates fast, but not infinitely.” Meaning we can’t count on those 600 to do the same. We can only hope.

Using Medium as an Example

We’re here, aren’t we? Might as well make use of the example within this landscape. Robin Dunbar explained his number informally as:

“the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

(Dunbar, Robin (1998). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. 1st Harvard University Press paperback ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 77.)

If you can reach 150 people like that on Medium, you are going to end up doing very well. But that’s much harder than one would think on this space station floating within a tiny portal of the internet. Even if you have 20,000 followers on Medium, would you approach them? And if not, does that say more about you than them?

Are we all too focused on scaling and not the actual relationship? Has a follower just become another notch on the side of our writing table, and we’ve forgotten that every follower could be one in your personal Dunbar’s number? I would argue that the writers with the biggest following on Medium are less likely to be able to find their 150 than you. So what if you started to focus on those 150 now? Where might you end up?

The number of followers we have here is completely meaningless in the grand scheme of the world. The majority of creatives here don’t have a laundry list of products to push. An e-book here. A How To Do Medium course there. A request to join a mailing list. And truth be told, I don’t think the number of sales done via calls-to-action on Medium is more than Dunbar’s number. So why are we highlighting the metric of our following?

It’s important to note that Dunbar’s number and his uninvited drink question involve real life. This isn’t real life until we meet each other. And most of us never will. Will you ever meet 150 people from Medium? Have you ever met one? But what if you paid the most attention to the people who clap, comment, and tweet your stories the most? Would this not be a better personal marketing strategy than focusing on Jerry, new to Medium, who has made four comments in six months and never written anything?

Focus

The number 150 was so important because it was found as a recurring capacity of relationship development in tribes and smaller societies. More than that became untenable for each person to know and rely on each other. But here we are, flexing about our following. What will bring more to our lives—100,000 avatars clicking buttons or 150 interconnected humans who share a common bond?

The common bond is you. But how you nurture your personal Dunbar’s number is what will likely predict your future success. If you aren’t interested in who your 150 is, you will never reap their rewards. Because once you get to 10,000, your 150 is just a needle in a haystack. Maybe if you paid more attention in the beginning, you would have better than just expected algorithmic growth. You would have more true fans.

Dunbar suggested that a community size of 150 would not be a mean for a community unless it is highly incentivized to remain together. And that’s the issue with everything online and how it may fail in application. Focus. How can we focus when we don’t even really know each other? The answer is inside the reasoning itself. By focusing on your own personal Dunbar’s number, you will inadvertently create an incentivized community. Even on the internet. The rest will take care of itself.