Wil Reynolds Wil Reynolds

January 30, 2009

Get your EGO out of your Twitter follower count

Looking at your number of followers like these people as an indication of your coolness or social media prowess is a lot like picking a large stack of 500 one dollar bills over a “small” stack of 10 one hundred dollar bills. Each dollar has a different value in the same way that each twitter follower has their own value. See Kevin Rose’s recent post on how to get additional Twitter followers.

Every time you mention “I need one more follower to get to X followers” you should lose followers not gain them.

That kind of neediness shows that you know nothing about social media (if that is what it is being called this week)! Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the number of followers you have as some kind of validation that you are good at what you do / know what you are doing. Stop it. OK. Just stop it. We all get followed by fake profiles, right? Will that follower ever be able to help you? NO! Then who care that they are following you, even though they add to your numbers, right!

Who you follow, and who follows you, should be more of a function of your propensity to HELP people and their propensity to help you. Until I can ask a question and get inundated by quality answers I do not have the right followers.

The number of people who find you interesting is not nearly as important as the number of people who are willing to help you when you tweet a problem you are having.

I for one don’t just follow people who follow me, I tend to follow people who are into HELPING people, very often helping others comes in the form of a DM which I can’t see, but my litmus test is simple – links in your Twitter stream (especially in replies) shows me that you are trying to get answers out to other people or post things that your followers might find helpful.

As I mentioned in my presentation at the Affiliate Summit in Vegas (recap here), one of the easiest ways to build links is seek out people you can help, in real life, in charities, on twitter, you name it. I talked about this not groundbreaking idea in my blog post titled the three link building tactics NO one talks about the first one is just simply helping people.

Twitter can be your water cooler, heck its mine too, but I do try to cheer friends up that are having bad days, and answer questions for people who are seeking to answers on things I may know. That is how you build quality Twitter followers, stop tweeting about your number of followers and GO HELP someone.

I recently got followed by someone – yes +1 followers on my tally. You know how I got followed by him.

I did a search one day when I was bored on an area where I might know a thing or two, SEO:

Sometimes I do searches for terms like:
Google penalty
SEO Help
Looking tool

And many other searches will show you tons of people like this tweet here from @brandonburke

Its only 140 characters people, so it isn’t a MAJOR time commitment to help, as a result of this tweet I got one follower and its OK to me to build my followers one at a time by helping rather than gimmicks.

6 COMMENTS

  • jgoode says:
    January 30, 2009 @ 11:13 am

    Wil, this is a perfect issue to bring up and I absolutely agree with your point! Here’s where I am finding the follower count hurting the point that I joined — I believe you never know who you’ll meet and where you’ll meet them, so I try to follow those that follow me. But, the more I am following, I am finding it more and more difficult to notice any one particular person on a consistent basis – how can I possibly have a conversation with anyone when there is so much noise? If I can’t do it with my small head count and great multitasking skills… how can anyone do it with hundreds upon hundreds of people? Do they just not follow back so they are asking for listeners but don’t bother to listen themselves?

    Maybe twitter is just a shoutbox for some folks – for them, that’s ok. For me it doesn’t work – I want to at least try to hear the people that have taken the time to notice me.

  • Rhea Drysdale says:
    January 30, 2009 @ 11:46 am

    Heh, I feel like a jerk, but had to unfollow a bunch of people yesterday after I saw a well known search marketer begging for more followers. Worse still, another social media expert wrote a script to auto-DM a solicitation asking me to befriend them on another network. Gahhh! When someone takes the time to show me how little they care about my time, we’re done. This should be required reading for anyone that signs up for Twitter.

  • Maria says:
    January 30, 2009 @ 12:05 pm

    I’m going to argue with you a bit here. I don’t think count is always about ego. While I don’t tweet about my number or ask for followers or follow people just because they autofollow back, etc., I do like the idea that something I say sometimes means enough to someone that they decide to follow me. And, honestly, looking at the count makes twitter a little more fun. And when working 12 hours a day, and your only break being a little play on twitter, the fun is very appreciated. Just my two cents.

  • Tom says:
    January 30, 2009 @ 3:32 pm

    LOL, GREAT POST, I agree! – Quality over quantity!

    By the way, I am now following you on Twitter =)

  • wil says:
    January 30, 2009 @ 4:18 pm

    Hey JGoode – You bring up a great point, I try very hard to follow people that follow me, but I use twitter more as a resource than a place to chat with friends, so if someone follows me b/c they like the content I deliver, but when I check out their profile they aren’t really posting a lot that I find useful – I think its OK. I used to try to follow everyone, but the minute it becomes too much noise to signal I have to unfollow. I feel like a bit of a d*ck for doing it, but if I didn’t twitter would be useless for me.

    @Rhea – Thanks for the comment! And I feel bad too when I unfollow but some people use it too much as a watercooler for my tastes. :(

    @Maria – Argue all day! I like a little banter. Believe you me, I track my followers, b/c I want to know if I am doing something to cause a lot of people to leave / unfollow. I also like knowing that my counts are growing and that there are more people out there finding my info useful and valuable, where I draw the line is asking people to follow me or coming up with some gimmick to get followers.

    @Tom – Thanks buddy! I am about 50/50 seo stuff and watercooler stuff, if I talk too much crap @me telling me to shut the heck up and get back to SEO :)

    Thanks everyone!

  • Tim Staines says:
    February 2, 2009 @ 10:34 pm

    I recently passed 100 followers! An ironic and twisted way to start my comment, I know. But I have to say that I had a really hard time NOT saying something about it on Twitter. My gut instinct was to keep it to myself, and I’m glad I did, but there is a significant amount of unintentional peer pressure associated with all of the people that do beg for followers like that.
    Besides the fact that I don’t feel like 100 followers is at all a big deal, I was also noticing heavy fluctuation in follower count a few weeks ago with all the fake followers, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay above 100 and didn’t want to be “that guy.”
    Twitter, like SEO, has a funny little clique identity that is really hard to break into IMO. I’m constantly noticing the response that some people get on Twitter, yet I rarely get any answers when I post a question. Maybe when I get to meet some of these people in person the responses will come, but I’ve been a fairly active twitter participant, and the only benefits I’ve received so far are the great links that the people I follow provide.
    For those of you that will be there, I’m attending IM Spring Break as my first SEO/Web Marketing conference. Cheers!

Required *

ADD A COMMENT: