As I started with Twitter, I noticed that Tweeple discussed “getting followers” as an end to itself. “I’m close to 2,000 followers, help me go over, please!” would be a typical Tweet. I got very into this, and now have over 3,000 followers. That sounds great, until you read about @Lotay – 26,000 followers, @Scobleizer – 80,000 followers, @nerdist – 134,000 followers, or @sacca with 315,000 followers. Celebrities have even more.
So what does it mean? Is there a reward for followers? Not at all. But surely if you have a lot of followers, when you send a Tweet, that means that many people read it, right? No, not that either. The reality is, Tweeple are mostly Tweeting, and very few are reading Tweets, especially ALL of the Tweets of the people they follow. For example, not only do I have over 3,000 followers, I’m following even more than that! There is simply no way I can read every Tweet from everyone I’m following. That kind of makes the whole “lots of followers” thing seem silly.
When I Tweet, with over 3,000 Tweeple following me, I figure, based on the few responses I get, that maybe a couple of dozen of my followers see any particular Tweet. Interestingly, I’m starting to believe that probably about the same number read my Tweets now as when I had only a few hundred followers.
The key, I believe, is to find Fans, not Followers, people who want to read your Tweets. I would guess that at least half of those following me did it so I’d follow them back. Another quarter I probably followed first and they followed me back out of courtesy. The rest might actually have known who I was in some way, maybe even just by seeing my avatar or reading my bio, before deciding to follow me. That doesn’t leave a lot of people who are taking the time to read my Tweets.
For me, I use TweetDeck (I have a TweetDeck tutorial here) to deal with following so many Tweeple. I can’t read them all, so, I have multiple categories of Tweeple. One category I named Main Follow, and I’ve included people I have found the most interesting and helpful. Another category is named Personal, where my outside-of-Twitter friends are included. A third is Contests and Deals, where I put Tweeple who Tweet discounts and contests. Finally, I have a search column for “Miva Merchant” and one for “chucklasker,” so I can see all Tweets with those terms, whether I follow the Tweeter or not.
Therefore, several times a day, I get into TweetDeck, review the columns I described, look for DMs and @Replies to me, then I browse the All Friends column to look for something interesting. This means I probably read about 500 Tweets a day, maybe more, but nothing close to the thousands that I receive.
So what should you do? Should you go after lots of followers? That’s up to you. But to me, what matters most is conversing, reTweeting, and building those relationships, regardless of how many followers you have or how many you are following. I’m no longer counting my followers, because I’ve decided that’s an irrelevant number.
If you want to get more Twitter tips, check out my new Twitter Tips blog.
UPDATE: Showing how much you can learn from reading Tweets by interesting people, today @danschawbel posted this Tweet: “Suppose You Stopped Asking People To Follow You On Twitter? http://tinyurl.com/chh5nb.” It has a different spin on the idea of “following.”