Philip Turpin

There’s a new Facebook group doing the rounds.  It’s called ‘Roll vs Cole’ and the aim is to see if the Sausage Roll group can get more followers than Cheryl Cole.

What interesting, though, about this particular group is that it’s made it onto the betting site, paddypower.com.

The deal is this:  The Sausage Roll group has to have more followers than Cheryl Cole by 8pm, Sunday 28th Feb.

Current odds are 1/4 yes and 5/2 no.  I think, based on the fact that the group has amassed an amazing 685,000 fans (at the time of writing) since it’s creation on 30th Jan 2010, it’s a fair bet (pun intended) that the Roll will beat Cole.

The facebook group can be found here: http://bit.ly/9jMhoI

Just in case you want to have a flutter, the Paddy Power page can be found here: http://bit.ly/9grRhM

How many of you people on Twitter, myself included, have gained a new Twitter follower only to mysteriously lose that follower almost instantly?  I have.  I’ve dug a little further and discovered a new breed of Twitter user (mainly “Social Media Experts” or “Twitter Marketers” as it happens), who obviously don’t really understand the fundamentals of Twitter.

You know this “follow me follow you” (FMFY) type of person.  They are following 26,903 and have 26,849 followers (almost always a deficit of less than a hundred or so).  They’re there, on Twitter, to “Help others achieve perpetual wealth whilst Twitter works itself so you can live your dreams making $4,000 a day”.  Now you know the breed I’m talking about.

So, as far as I can tell, this is how it works…

• They’ll follow you.
• They’ll then ‘unfollow’ you within hours or, at most, days if they’ve had no ‘refollow’.

If you then decide to follow them then they normally follow you back.

Now some people might think that’s an efficient way to operate on Twitter.  Now let me tell you why it’s not.

• Twitter isn’t about numbers.  It’s not about how many people you follow and it’s not about how many people follow you.
• It’s about creating value in your relationships (most of you reading this, I hope, will already understand this).
• If someone is playing this FMFY game then they are focussed purely on the numbers and not the value.

These people tend not to get followed back.