By Elise Moreau
Trends Expert, about.com
If you follow any big online personalities that are typically positioned to be entertainers for a teen
or young adult crowd, you might have seen a trend that many of them
often take advantage of to help grow their audiences. They're called follow sprees,
and when a really huge influencer announces one is going to take place
online, there's no telling how much social engagement and viral reach
they'll achieve from it.
What's a Follow Spree?
It's just what it sounds like. A user will quite literally follow hundreds (or possibly even thousands) of users on Twitter, Instagram, Vine
or some other social network. Facebook is usually left out of the
picture because it's not as open as many of the other popular social
networks out there.
It sounds pretty basic, but the most
influential online celebs have a trick that harnesses the power of their
adoring fans. They already know how big they are online and how much
their followers love them, so in an effort to expand their reach and
make their current fans happy, they typically bribe their followers to
share their content with a promise to potentially follow them back if
they do it.
Given the fact that the users who announce follow sprees often have
hundreds of thousands of fans, there's never any guarantee that if a
user participates, they'll definitely get followed back. The most loyal
fans can only keep trying every time a follow spree is announced and
hope it will happen some day.
There's No Wrong Way to Do a Follow Spree
Follow sprees come in all sorts of different variations, but it basically consists of announcing, "If you do X, I will follow Y of you back," where X could be a retweet, a revine, use of a hashtag or anything else -- and Y
could be a specific number or a hint at a number that's completely
unclear. Some celebs announce it hours or days ahead of time to create
anticipation and prepare their fans for it.
Here's an example of a real tweet
from Vine star Nash Grier letting his followers know that he'd be doing
a follow spree. In the tweet, he specifically states that followers
must retweet his last three tweets, but leaves the other half of it
vague and open-ended, saying he'd "follow a bunch" of users back if they
did what he instructed them to do.
Now, Nash is a social media
pro and is wildly plugged into engaging with his fans, so he easily gets
over 10K retweets and favorites for almost everything he tweets. He
even takes his follow spree strategy up a knotch by promising an even more intimate reward in this tweet -- a private direct message for anyone who retweets him. (Or at least as many as he decides he wants to to message.)
And would you look at that! Over 33K retweets in just over two hours since he tweeted. Not bad, huh?
Why Teens Love Follow Sprees
According to a survey conducted by Variety, teens
are more starstruck by YouTube and Vine celebrities than they are with
mainstream Hollywood celebrities. Regular people turned vlogging pros
like Jenna Marbles, Tyler Oakley, Nash Grier, Jerome Jarre and so many
more have put out enormous amounts of great content, perfected their
personalities and nurtured their followers enough to be among the most
beloved and successful Internet darlings in the entire world.
Teens
and young adults, driven by the hormone-induced emotional states that
propel them to latch onto people they really look up to and admire, will
often do literally anything to simply be acknowledged by
someone like Nash, or any other online star. It's exactly why follow
sprees work exclusively for this type of audience only.
The Power of an Extremely Loyal and Engaged Online Fan Base
With
a small audience or an audience that isn't very engaged, follow sprees
wouldn't work very well (or even at all). Despite being such a wildly powerful viral marketing tactic,
you'll never see brands or businesses using them, and that's because
social media users don't admire or relate to them them the same way as
they do with the personalities of these Internet celebs.
In
reality, the celebs who get to take advantage of their thousands of
emotional and impulsive fans through follow sprees are totally normal,
average kids who are just playing the popularity game in a more extreme
case similar to what you see in high school. In the eyes of pubescent
teenage users, however, each celeb's carefully crafted videos, photos, tweets, and status updates are enough to make them seem virtually perfect. Huge bonus points if they're vaguely attractive too.
But
as each celeb and their audience is destined to grow up, so too will
they eventually grow out of the follow spree trend. If you're currently
an 18 year-old average kid who happens to get thousands of retweets or
reshares in a mere matter of minutes, though, it would probably be
pretty hard to even think about ever wanting to give that amount of
success and admiration up.
