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Why 100 Followers is Better than 1000

By Mark Johnson on 29 April 2010 @ 11:18 AM.

Tags: twitter, twitter followers, twitter noise.

Twitter is a wonderful and misunderstood thing. There are plenty of articles about getting new followers, but it seems like some times people miss the point. Having 10,000 followers would be great wouldn't it? But that is still no guarantee that anyone will actually hear you.

When you start out on Twitter it is tempting to follow everyone you can find in the hopes they will follow you back. In fact that is what many people do, and it really isn't that hard to accumulate several thousand followers if you take that route. The problem is this; having a thousand 'followers' does not necessarily mean that a thousand people are actually following you.

There is an ever increasing amount of 'noise' on twitter. Businesses and spammers alike are jumping on the bandwagon for the opportunity to broadcast their message, and unfortunately even the genuine businesses are coming across as spam some of the time. Fortunately this problem mostly exists in circles of mass followers.

It is for this reason that avoiding the noise and building up a following of people who really care what you have to say is far more effective that going hell for leather to build up 10,000 followers, or whatever arbitrary goal you set yourself.

Think about your own account for a moment. How many people do you follow? If you are following even 100 people, chances are you don't know who most of them are. You might only really be following about 10-15 of those people, the other 85-90 are just noise. This is normal, you can't possibly listen to 100 people all talking at you at once.

What about people who are following a thousand or more people then? how many of those do you think they actually listen to? This basically illustrates my point, the mutual follow and follow back is vanity, people building up followers so that they can look good.

The real challenge is building up a genuine following of people who will listen to every tweet you send, who will want to discuss your tweets with you and re-tweet them to their friends.

Summary

Having a lot of followers on Twitter can be a bit like standing in a room with several hundred people, all talking about their own thing. Try shouting about your business, how many people will get the message? I would rather stand in a room with 20 or 30 people who would actually listen, who I could talk to about my business and theirs.

That's the real beauty of Twitter, and if you can filter out the noise you might just discover it for yourself. Be genuine, and you never know, you might end up with 10,000 followers who genuinely do follow you. But the message is; Quality before Quantity... Just like so many things in life.

About the Author

Mark Johnson is an internet marketer and SEO specialist. He runs his own internet marketing blog Marks Marketing Blog, where he talks about SEO, PPC, Social networking, Conversion rates and website design and anything else that springs to mind.