How Many Twitter Followers is Enough?

By Scott Hepburn | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

Spend enough time on Twitter, and you’ll hear a chorus of sages scold you: “Follower count doesn’t matter…stop counting your followers.”

They’re right (sorta), but as one of the few hard measurables of Twitter, many of us cling to follower count as an important metric.

If you want a more meaningful way to look at follower count, consider this blurb from Elliott Kosmicki on Mashable

If you’re following 1,000 people, and have somehow got 800 of those people to follow you back, it doesn’t really mean that much. But if 800 people have come across you on their own and started following you, while you’re only following the 80 people you care about – that says something about your value. It says that people follow you because you’re valuable, not because you’ve started following them first.

Obsessing over your follower count isn’t healthy, but this simple advice from Elliott is a good way to give that number some value.

Thoughts?

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Topics: Social Media
  • You have to start somewhere, so you follow a lot of random people unless you can use the search feature effectively. From there though once you have a solid base of people (a few hundred) is when you start to get people who are actually interested in what you have to say.

    A few weeks ago I hit the 1,000 followers mark and have since then been getting a lot more followers each day because i get a lot of RT and @ a lot of people in my relative industry.

    I use Tweetdeck to aggregate all my followers into a much better GUI. From there i use the search feature to only read relative information that pertains to me apposed to the "all friends" feed. This is where you cant put a limit on the number of followers you have. Almost anyone I follow from here on out myself is someone that I have a direct interest in and then they follow me back.

    It's a great cycle.
  • I like to follow those who follow me. You never know where or when you will find a piece of information that could change your direction in life. I appreciate people's tweets espcecially when they do come from a place of sharing from the heart. www.Twitter.com/SuperProsperity
  • I think you should follow everyone who follows you back (unless their a spammer). Once you follow more then 100 or so people you can't keep up anyway. A big thing is that following someone back gives them the chance to DM you. You never know when someone might want to reach out to you for something and it could be a great contact for you.

    In terms of keeping track of everything it all comes down to your searches, groups, @replies, DMs and maybe even integrating something like friendfeed groups if you really want to get crazy. This is why tweetdeck is so amazing.
  • Think it's a little bit of A, a little bit of B.

    A lot of people have asked me why I follow almost as many people as follow me. It's not an auto thing, simply a choice. The reason is simple: while I can't keep up with every single tweet going on, I still find what that person is about interesting. And there's the offchance that I might just see that one nugget of info I'd otherwise have missed, that will rock my world and change the way I view something.
  • Not sure I agree fully with Elliott. If 800 people "found" you, then you are probably pushing out valuable information that people want to read. But if you're only following 80 - how is that engaging and creating conversation with your followers? I don't do auto-follow-backs, but I'm always willing to take a look at the bios and Tweetstreams of people who follow me and see if I might be able to learn something from them.

    I like the idea of a Conversation Quotient metric (at Twitter-friends.com) moreso than focusing on follower numbers. Is the person engaging, replying, sharing useful information? If they have thousands of followers but all they're doing is pushing out links to their blog post with every Tweet, then it's not worth my time to follow - I'll just go grab the RSS feed.
  • Scott I hopefully show tonight how many are gaming the follower counts to skew the metric. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/socialmediasphere/...
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