Why Twitter Followers are Worthless
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It’s not too often I get an email from Twitter telling me I have a new person with a high follower count following me. When they do, I tend to look into what they’re all about on their profile.
9/10 times it’s someone who follows twice as many people as they have following them. 10/10 times said person is a “social media power user”.
I’ve been experimenting for months with Twitter. As a proof of concept, I setup my personal account as my “garbage” account where I follow everyone who follows me back. Lo and behold, I amassed 2,700 followers of which I follow 2,685 back. I don’t read the news feed, I don’t respond to messages, I don’t care about anything that any one of my fellow “Twitter power users” have to say.
After three months with my two twitter accounts I have discovered two major points which I think will help shut everyone up who brags about their twitter follower count.
- If you can’t mobilize your followers for feedback, links, retweets, or an opinion: they’re worthless.
- Twitter is a vehicle for word of mouth, but offline word of mouth is always better than online word of mouth.
Stop worrying so much about how many, and think more in terms of quality. My meager 700 followers on the Assault Official Twitter account give me better feedback and more interaction than my 3,000 followers on my garbage account. Twitter “friends” or “fans” are way more valuable than a mass of zombie followers.
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About the Author
Tim is the co-owner of Assault, and is responsible for the creative direction of both Assault Shirts as well as AssaultBLOG. Follow him on twitter @assault
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Great post and point. Focusing on numbers is a hacks attempt to prove value of their efforts (like counting how many media releases you sent – big deal, did you get a story and did the story lead the readers to your site, etc.)
Bottom line, determining objectives is critical in any effort and evaluating social media just like any other communication tool is imperative for success. If only following 20 and only having 20 follow helps you achieve your objectives and goals then your job is done.
Great insight and can be extended to other social media locations as well. For years this has been my rant regarding MySpace. Many bands are there to increase friend numbers but when asked how they are benefiting from these high numbers most cannot come up with an answer. Just having high friend/follower counts does not equate into more exposure or added benefit if you are not building an engaged, interactive fan base.
The reason this is such a constant topic is because our culture is always looking for a quick buck. Internet Marketers though up the idea of just following thousands of people so that you’d build your numbers, but then what you have are just thousands of people all pitching the same junk to each other. I would much prefer to have a nice, small, tight nit group of followers that actually knows each other and have discussions on topics daily then a platform to spam junk.
This comment was originally posted on Digg
I agree. I get sick of the spam get 10,000 new followers etc. Quality over quantity every time – like real friends.
This comment was originally posted on Digg
Good Discovery
Thanks Captain Obvious!
There are many twitter applications through which you can know your position as twitter followers in number of tweets received.
i follow twice as much people,but that’s because 95% of the artist i follow don’t give a shit about me,so don’t follow me,i may only have 37 followers,but 98% of them give me feedback and are fun to talk to
[...] the other day I was reading a post over at the Assault Blog titled Why Twitter Followers Are Worthless. The author argued that: 1. “If you can’t mobilize your followers for feedback, links, [...]
I agree with everything you said there Coty. I do the exact same thing. I get a handful of daily Twitter emails that say so and so are following you. I got through the same process as you but I try not to follow everyone back because I don’t really want to get lost in my timeline. I like to read a majority of what I missed throughout the day so if I have a timeline of a bunch of random tweets then Twitter will have become useless to me. Luckily with the new lists, I have actually save a bunch of time now and I can click exactly who I want to see in a specific category that I set people into. Do you find it tough to follow all those people and keep up with what they are saying? If you miss tweets, do you just disregard them and just continue moving forward?
This comment was originally posted on Coty Gonzales | Glorious Nonsensities of the Random Kind.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the post @Jbenjamin82!
I don’t even try to keep up with my Twitter timeline. I like it because I can jump in and out and see what is going on at any given moment. I do however, scan my timeline posts within the past hour or so to see if I’ve missed anything important that had been posted recently. but for the most part, I check in, see if anything interests me and check out. Having said that, my Twitter client is open on my computer 24/7. So it’s fairly easy for me to jump in and out of Twitter.
This comment was originally posted on Coty Gonzales | Glorious Nonsensities of the Random Kind.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by cotygonzales: Some rules I go bywhen deciding whether to follow people or not on Twitter. http://su.pr/8fhmPU Long post, be warned!…
This comment was originally posted on Coty Gonzales | Glorious Nonsensities of the Random Kind.
Good post Coty, it’s the same process as I go through too, though I can never decide if it’s really worth me following every tee brand that follows me.
This comment was originally posted on Coty Gonzales | Glorious Nonsensities of the Random Kind.
RT @assault: ,,/ : Why Twitter Followers are Worthless http://su.pr/2A8H6x
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Thank you for this!!!! I’m brand new to Twitter and followed someones advise to “go follow as many people as you can and then they’ll all start following you back”. Needless to say, I saw no results and ended up with the very uneven number of following/followers you are talking about. Now I see my stupidity and have come to realize what I am doing wrong. So I am going to give this another shot and really stick to your rules here. Thanks a lot!!!
-Shannon
This comment was originally posted on Coty Gonzales | Glorious Nonsensities of the Random Kind.
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This comment was originally posted on Coty Gonzales | Glorious Nonsensities of the Random Kind.