Comments on: Twitter Reality Check: How Many Followers Should You Really Have by Now?

By: 10 Ways to Make Your Tweets Stand Out

10 Ways to Make Your Tweets Stand Out — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:08:43 +0000

[...] shouldn’t focus on just growing the number of followers you have, you should rather focus on getting your followers to interact and discuss what you tweet. Ask [...]

By: Does The False Face Of Social Media Have Value? | AffSpot Affiliate Directory

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:06:17 +0000

[...] many times have you seen an overgrown Twitter account and wondered really how effective it is? You’re not the only one to ponder this question. [...]

By: Does The False Face Of Social Media Have Value? | SMS

Does The False Face Of Social Media Have Value? | SMS — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:47:19 +0000

[...] many times have you seen an overgrown Twitter account and wondered really how effective it is? You’re not the only one to ponder this question. [...]

By: Mark Sim

Mark Sim — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:40:15 +0000

Anti-Twitter here. Despite it’s rapid growth and continued popularity I think Twitter is a fad and not really worth the time of any business. Seriously, what business do you need to be in that requires you to keep you ‘fans’ updated as to your activities on a day to day or hour to hour basis? It’s a great tool for celebrity stalkers and sharing jokes, but has anyone ever heard of a company which made a killing thanks to that tweet they sent? Twitter is a waste of time.

By: John | Avocat Bucuresti

John | Avocat Bucuresti — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 23:57:36 +0000

This is a difficult idea because the followers can be bots, created just to be able to attract more visitors to their own posts. I’ve tested few things on Twitter and I can say that the automatic tweets are representing a huge percent of the number of totally tweets.

However, I am impressed by the number of your followers. I have about 800, after a year of work !

By: Net Age | Web Design

Net Age | Web Design — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:46:26 +0000

I still do not get all the fuss about twitter, and have given up trying to follow and sift through all the noise that you get bombarded with. For me it doesn’t offer much value, but I am hoping that something will happen to convince me otherwise. From what I’m seeing quite a lot of the big name bloggers in the make money online niche are promoting building your list huge so you can make some tidy money off sponsored tweets. That I get, but I prefer to make my money in other ways, thank you very much!

By: darian

darian — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:34:58 +0000

i really dont get i never used to have a lot of followers and now i have more like 18 followers a day and i have to accept them i dont even know THEM! i dont get it because i usually never had a lot of followers before and then all of a sudden there’s so many and its really annoying now help!

By: RROD

RROD — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:29:51 +0000

You have to really be intriguing to get followers on Twitter.
I don’t mean that in an offensive manner, but usually people don’t desire to recognize what a stranger is doing every minute of the day.

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:08:07 +0000

@Lc.David: thanks for posting – and don’t worry – despite all the buzz that Twitter is getting in the news, Twitter only has approximately 75 million users. Do you anticipate joining Twitter soon?

By: Lc.David

Lc.David — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:35:10 +0000

I still Havn’t joined Twitter….
Thanks for the post…

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:14:37 +0000

@SEONOW: how long did it take you to reach 12,000 followers?

By: SEONOW

SEONOW — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:21:20 +0000

We agree Quality Over Quanitiy. We have reached 12,000 followers. If the people have value will follow them and not drop them. We use Twitter as a introduction tool. The key is to engage the users to establish relationships. This a time consuming process if you want to do it right. Any questions follow us at http://www.twitter.com/SEONOW

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:38:27 +0000

Interesting points, James. Autofollow and then dumping spammers is a good way to get things going as well. In regard to the quality of followers improving, I would argue that shouldn’t have much to do with followers/following (unless you are way over or underbalanced) but more about the nature of what you post about and the frequency that you do it.

By: James Morris

James Morris — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:23:59 +0000

Depends. I massive unfollow a ton of people, but I had my account set to autofollow for a couple months and it got loaded w/ spammers. All the people I drop are spammers. Everyone else gets a chance to show their value.

Since dropping several hundred spammers from my following list, I’ve actually found that the quality of my followers has started to improve (gaining known, influential followers vs. marginal or obscure followers) and I’m getting more of them, faster.

So, depending on the person, I suppose…

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:50:48 +0000

@rishil: thanks for commenting, and I’ve also had a look at your post. While I do agree with you about following everyone can be rough in terms of signal vs noise, I’d like to point out a few things:

-some people just think it is good ettiquette to follow people that follow you. I’d agree that there is some basic courtesy in this, but should not be taken to the extreme of following blatent spammers.

-one of the latest “trends” is for people to start massively unfollowing people. While I see the reasons why they do this, it makes me wonder if they would have been able to get the numbers of followers in the first place.

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:20:25 +0000

@Tad Chef: thanks for stopping in – how many followers can I handle? How many you got?

Seriously though, with the advent of groups in several third party tools and Twitter lists, you should theorethically be able to handle any number of Twitter followers. What I think you’re asking though is how to handle all the followers within one’s friend stream. That’s a good question that I don’t have a good answer to, especially considering things like Dunbar’s number (a theory that people really can’t keep up relationships beyond 150 people). The good thing is that we really don’t have to keep up with every single person we’re following: in fact, if you look at many Twitter “celebrities,” you’ll see that they are mainly just replying to people that are mentioning them. So while it may look like they are hyper active (in upwords of 100 Tweets a day), they are really just taking care of dm’s and mentions.

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:15:15 +0000

@Jim Gaudet: thanks for stopping in. You’re correct in my opinion that you don’t have to “listen” to everyone, especially considering that even subject matter experts might be talking about what they had for breakfast when you’re tuning into them.
RTS is certainly becoming an influential factor which can be seen from Google and Bing dealing with Twitter integration. They were getting worried that people might just start skipping the search engine and go right to Twitter search.

There is no magic number on the number of followers/following, the main point of this post was to get people thinking beyond the numbers – appreciate your insight!

By: rishil

rishil — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:44:49 +0000

I think following everyone back is a silly idea - expecialy for individual. How do you make sense of the noise signal? At the same time a large number of followers may sound like a great idea, but more important is to judge their interaction with you - if that level is low, then again it's a pointless exercise. I am with rebecca on this one, lists are a great way to manage large number of people you WANT to follow, without having to follow them. (link to a post I wrote on this very issue that yo may find interesting - appreciate your feedback)

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:28:02 +0000

Great points, James – thanks for commenting.

“Gimme 2000 Quality followers/following members who will engage and promote my account over 20,0000 sheeple any day! ”

Influence is definitely a deciding factor of true Twitter value. That’s why services such as Klout are useful. Also interesting – you can try to do a link strength test: put out a bit.ly link on a 2,000 vs 20,000 account at around the same time of day and subject, and then see how many people are actually clicking through – you might just be surprised

By: Tad Chef

Tad Chef — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:09:15 +0000

The question is: How many followers can you handle?