Commentary
Twitter Follower Count Doesn't Equal Quality
- by dave.b , Max Kalehoff , August 13, 2010
How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many followers should you have?
While Twitter follower count is the most cited metric of Twitter profile importance, I really don't care about that number. With some exceptions, I've found little correlation between the value of a Twitter profile and the number of followers. Some people with high follower counts are interesting, and some aren't. Some people with low follower counts are interesting, and some aren't.
So let's flip this question on its head: How many people do you follow on Twitter -- and whom do you follow? I'm more intrigued with these questions because the number and types of profiles you follow says more about who and how interesting you are than the number of people who follow you.
The number of people you follow can indicate how selective, inclusive or careless you are in grooming your online social network. For example, if you're following 15,000 people, chances are that you're not very selective in where you grant your attention. Or it might mean that you're willing to friend anyone in hopes of reciprocity -- with the goal of claiming a massive follower count. People whose foremost motivation is popularity taint themselves. If you're selective in your follower count, it probably means you are more thoughtful in where you allocate your attention; in many cases, that also means you're more thoughtful in your interactions and expressions.
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Then there's whom you follow -- which says a lot about who you are and how relevant you are to me. This list indicates where your interests and social preferences lie, and provides insight into motivation. If you have a tendency to limit your following to more interesting people, whom I also find interesting, then I'm likely to trust and explore additional people in your social graph, and be more interested in your recommendations and expressions.
I'm following about 453 people as of this writing, though 100 really matter to me. It's not that all 453 people aren't important, it's just that I have limited attention. And even 100 active Twitter profiles creates a status stream that is relatively tough to follow. Sure, there are Twitter Lists now, which help segment and aggregate a higher volume of Twitter profiles into interest groups, but the problem of status update overflow remains massive and seems to get worse everyday. Until we get better tools to filter Twitter streams, I think 100 is the magic number of people to follow.
What's your method for evaluating the value of a Twitter profile? How do you select and filter Twitter profiles and tweets so they create value -- versus noise -- in your life?
How many people do you follow?
How many people should you follow?
Max - you are on the money again... I was with a client yesterday and this matter of twitter follower counts came up... I basically took your exact line of thinking in my response...
There seem to be a lot of ding-bats with bu'cu follower counts... But as you pointed out - what's the real value...
Like all things - there are short cuts and journeys... I may have a small following myself on Twitter (under a 1,000) but I actually feel like I know my followers... And thats how I see the true value in my twitter account...
Understand -
I'm a lover- not a hater when it comes to Twitter... So I was happy to see you set the record straight... It's not the size of your "blank" but how you use it... If you get my drift ( :
Happy #FollowFriday @johnnyboyolive
good blog post. i've often felt following > followers. to me, being overly concerned with your follow count speaks to an egotistical behavior that i'd prefer not to indulge.
i typically have 5 types of people i follow:
1. friends
2. sports writer/bloggers & athletes
3. social media and tech gurus
4. music bloggers
5. random people who tweet random funny things
each one of these categories speaks to my interest so my following behavior i guess can be boiled down to following people who share similar interest.
i tried to follow everyone back who followed me but that started to get out of hand when the likes of @obamamonkey started following me.
ive been active on twitter since nov 07 w/ a following count of approx 1,100 and followers count of approx 900.
Max, you nailed it. I've been saying the same since I started tweeting; how can you carry on a conversation with a horde?
When someone who is following thousands of people starts to follow me, I know it's all about the numbers. Unless they are saying something REALLY compelling that I'm unlikely to hear anywhere else, I ignore them, and, true to my original assessment of them, they eventually un-follow me.
I have 537 followers and I'm following 465. I would say that most, maybe three quarters of the people or organizations I follow know a lot more than I do about some subject that interests me, and I follow them to learn from them. Whether they follow me back or not is immaterial; I'm getting value from the relationship because I'm learning. The rest I consider "friends". With friends, the following and conversation are usually reciprocal.
Like you, I can barely keep up with the people I follow. I actually review them periodically so I can cull any who have become inactive or uninteresting -- just like you would do at a cocktail party.
And therein, IMHO, lies the genius of Twitter: everyone gets to have what they want. We shuffle and reshuffle contacts, weave in and out of conversations, and hopefully, get followed by people who care what we have to say.
Of course, even the most interesting cocktail party can become wearisome after a while, but that's a topic for another day.
Timing of this piece was excellent given that it's #FollowFriday today.
I look at Twitter from a couple of perspectives.
On one hand, Twitter is a great source for news and information on an almost faster than real time basis. I'm sure everybody remembers when Michael Jackson passed away. As soon as TMZ shot a report out on it, the twitterverse went bananas and eventually froze. If you love sports and you follow people that share the same passion, you get news and score updates as they occur on Twitter.
But f you love twitter for news and information, there does come a point in time where an increase in the number of people you follow leads to a decrease in the amount of information that becomes helpful in a real time basis.
In another way, though, Twitter is also a game for many people and gaining followers is as much about the hunt and kill as anything else. Of course there are folks out there who have hundreds if not thousands of followers and yet they are just not that interesting but it doesn't matter if you know how to game the system and you hook up with other folks doing the same thing.
For me, I want to be entertained and/or informed about things that interest me. In my case I like to hear about whats going on in the world of music, art, fashion, politics, soccer and of course computer games and so I follow people that share similar interests.
Happy #FF @t33mhonda
I try and keep it where I follow half as many as follow me. I find I can always groom out a couple of people and never follow anyone back just because they follow me. I look at their follow/following ratio and make a determination without even looking at their profile usually.
I completely agree. In my experience the more "focused" and targeted communities are the ones that are most engaged. I typically counsel people getting started with Twitter to be very focused on what they want the conversations they are having to be about...and focus on building their community that way, rather than just following everyone they can to accumulate massive numbers. The conversations are much more fruitful that way.