What's in a Follow?

One of the core behaviors on any social media product is choosing whom/what to follow. Following is how we curate our experience and the content with which we want to interact. Additionally, when it comes to being recommended accounts to follow, an important input is to consider accounts being followed by others in our network. That is, the accounts being followed by accounts you are following become a source for potentially expanding your following list.

Following and Signaling

In economics there is an idea called signaling. From the Wikipedia page:

“...the idea that one party (termed the agent) credibly conveys some information about itself to another party (the principal).”

So what does this have to do with who you follow on social media? Well consider that I follow Steve. Presumably it’s because I want to hear what he has to say or interact with the content he creates. Now let’s say that Steve follows Alisa (and I am not). It’s reasonable to assume that Steve knows something, that I don’t know, that leads him to follow Alisa. That’s a signal to me, that perhaps I would get value out of following Alisa, after all Steve has “vouched” for her through his own act of following her.

Follow != Endorsement

What if, in the scenario above, Steve follows Alisa because she’s his niece? If I follow Steve for his takes on product building, then the signal associated with his following of Alisa is inadvertent. Or conversely, what if Steve follows Alisa because she often takes controversial stances on product development … positions Steve feels compelled to counter. In this case Steve isn’t really indicating that others should follow Alisa even if he has his own reasons for doing so. Lastly, what if Steve follows Alisa because she’s his mentor and he gleans much of his insights about product building by taking cues from Alisa? In this case Steve actually does want to signal to others that they should follow Alisa.

From the scenarios above we can tease out three distinct intentions around the behavior of following:

• Following - Curation of a source of content that I want to interact with (for any number of reasons)
• Recommended Following - Not only is my following of this source bringing me value, I want to signal to the rest of my network that this account will likely bring them value as well.
• Private Following - This following is only useful to me. I don’t want to send any signals whatsoever by allowing anyone to observe this following relationship*.

* This becomes even more important the larger my following becomes. Celebs with millions of followers may avoid following certain accounts specifically to work around the signaling that comes by broadcasting an endorsement conveyed by following.

Following on Sound Off

Here at Sound Off we’re always looking for ways to improve upon the typical social media experience. The subtleties around following may not seem important at first glance. But think about how many “sockpuppet” accounts are created because there’s currently no way to keep private who you’re following (Pierre Delecto anyone?). Alternatively accounts that make a point to follow back anyone who follows them don’t really add much of a signal through a follow. Sound Off makes these behaviors explicit.

Recommended

When visiting a User’s profile, in addition to seeing their Follower and Following counts, you’ll also see a list of accounts recommending that others follow this User.

Additionally, when scrolling through a User’s list of Followers or whom they are Following we call out their followers who explicitly recommend the User. We also call out anyone this User is following that they recommend. This gives an explicit signal around following, rather than being implicit.

Private

Conversely when you’re privately following an account, only you and the other account can see that relationship. Your Follower and Following counts are automatically deducted when your User profile is viewed by anyone other than you. In this way we don’t indicate, whatsoever, that you have any private followings or followers. Similarly scrolling through a list of Followers or Followings omits any accounts that are following your User privately or whom your User is following privately.

Conclusion

While these may seem like subtle features, we think they can be really important. The ability to privately follow or recommend accounts to follow is a premium feature. While some people today purchase bots to increase their follow count, the only way to have a high number of accounts recommending your User for following is to actually provide value to others. It’s not economically attractive to maintain a large number of premium account bots solely to increase one’s recommended count. Also, as you gain visibility on the platform we think it’s important that you still maintain a sense of privacy. Being able to carve out a portion of who you’re following and keep that private is an important piece of maintaining your privacy.

If you’d like to test this out yourself register below for early beta access to Sound Off and give us your feedback!