Twitter Followers: Quality Over Quantity
by James
From DailySEOBlog:
Don’t tell me that Twitter is all about good karma, bliss and living happily ever after! Everybody knows that everyone is looking for more followers. Period.
Rubbish. The number of followers you have on Twitter doesn’t matter: what matters is the quality of your followers.
If I were a small blogger who wrote about Mac software, and posted links to my blog on Twitter, one of the best things that could happen to me would be to have John Gruber follow my updates and re-tweet them. Even if John Gruber were the only person to follow me, his re-tweets would massively raise my profile in the indie Mac community. Which would be great (if I were an indie Mac blogger).
I’d hazard a guess that a sizable proportion of the mass of people who follow people like Oprah or Stephen Fry (who have 1,342,000 and 542,000 followers respectively) just see the follower status as a badge of honour — “yeah, I love Oprah so I follow her on Twitter”. Whether these people actually pay careful attention to their tweets is another question entirely. The DailySEOBlog actually links to an article which makes the same point: there is probably no direct correlation between the number of followers you have, and the number of people who click links in your tweets.
The race for more followers is basically a popularity contest. When combined with a desire to drive traffic to an external website (blog, sales, viagra, whatever), it reminds me of bad SEO in that it puts too much emphasis on numbers and not enough emphasis on content and findability. What you say is as important as who you say it to, and quality Twitter followers will be the folk who read what you write and pass it on if they value what you have to say — you don’t need thousands of them, just enough to reach an audience. Twitter should be a network based on quality, not dominance of numbers.
Agreed, and personally while I have x followers, I’m sure that the percentage of them who actually interact with me is relatively low. If I add value to their network, fine, but if they don’t fall into a rather limited number of categories that I’m interested in, I don’t follow back.
From the opposite perspective, I follow people who I come across who add value to my own network, and in fact, I’m probably less likely to follow someone with hundreds or thousands of followers themselves–not always, but often.
In the end, I think many people feel lost in the shuffle, and crave attention in any way they can get it. Better to cultivate a few meaningful relationships, as you say, than many empty ones.