Article: Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees… Nothing


What he has learned is that these users aren't engaging him, they are just blindly following thanks to the Suggested User feature of Twitter. They don't retweet, they don't reply, they don't follow his links. They are just there, perhaps ignoring their own Twitter accounts. Anil and the other 400 people on the list are essentially bundled content that Twitter doesn't have to provide, meaning there isn't really any value to the followers. This ultimately makes his placement on the list meaningless. These are readers he cannot leverage in any measurable way. Anil recognized this pretty quickly (emphasis his):


In a typically brief missive on Seth Godin's blog, Seth distills the entire story down to: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value. He argues a general strategy, seemingly to Anil Dash:


I get the impression Seth just read the singular quote from Anil's post about no appreciable difference. I hope not. I hope the casual reader of Seth's post or of the tweets flying around about this take a moment to understand where those followers came from and why they started following. Those followers chose to follow, but they clearly didn't understand why and have no lasting interest. Anil correctly excludes them when targeting his tweets.


Since then, some accounts with many followers have begun selling tweets to advertisers. Consider Kim Kardashian's $10,000 per tweet fee for sneaking sponsored tweets into her own (assuming she actually has any of her own), or Perez Hilton's similar approach. To be fair, if you follow these accounts you can't really be surprised that they do this, nor can I be surprised if you fall for it.




The problem here is that employers, sponsors, partners, etc. expect to see high numbers of followers. A high follower count doesn't mean very much, but there is no safe way to make that argument without offending the person who writes the checks. As long as media outlets and "social media experts" push the follower count as an all-important measuring stick, stressing that the number must climb or that it directly correlates to the success of the tweeter, it will be an uphill battle for those trying to create meaningful connections in their social media accounts (not just Twitter).


No comments? Be the first!

Leave a Comment or Response

