Flicker photo: mattedgarLately, I've noticed an uptick in the number of tweets on this theme:
I found an AWESOME way to get tons of followers on Twitter in days! (Insert spammy link here.)
This got me to thinking: Do we really want thousands of followers?
There's no shortage of folks out there telling you how. Then there are those mocking the tellers; just search for "twitter eleventy-billion" in any search engine for a great example, but be warned that it's pretty NSFW. There are even services out there that will auto-gather followers -- or let you buy them.
Yes, even in the age of social media, old school rules are being trotted out: bigger is still, apparently, better. The more followers you have, the more people may see your message, click on it, and take action. I get that. But like Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily, I'll take quality over quantity.
Here's my Twitter philosophy:
- Don't sweat the numbers. I don't worry about the absolute number of followers I have. Instead, I keep an eye on it to make sure it's not suddenly trending down. If that happens, I must've said something bad. Likewise, an upward trend means I'm generally delivering good value to people.
- Deliver value. I think of Twitter as a way to give the NTEN community some good, extra stuff every day. It's an easy way to get good information into their hands quickly, as well as a way to thank people for being awesome by re-tweeting and the like. I can measure my value to the community by using services like TwitteRank, TwitterGrader, or TweetStats, among others. I'm no @chrisbrogan, but these services do tell me not only how many people follow me, but whether they value my tweets.
And that's it. I don't really care how many people follow me on Twitter. I just care that they find my efforts worthwhile. I figure if I focus on that, the numbers will follow.