How many Twitter followers do you have?

Certain celebs have hundreds of thousands, while other Twitter “elite” boast tens of thousands. While most social media gurus agree that it’s not all about the numbers, I’d be willing to bet that you’d like to have more rather than less Twitter followers. C’mon, who wouldn’t? After all, in order to market our businesses, we need to reach people – and more reach means more influence. So you could argue that, from a marketing standpoint, Twitter is a numbers game.

I want my message to reach as many people as possible, even if that message is only 140 characters long. And I have to admit, when I’m considering a joint venture or strategic partnership, I always check to see how many followers my potential partner has. If it wasn’t important, would book publishers be asking their authors how many Twitter followers they reach? Bigger is always better.

Or is it? Let’s take a closer look. Big numbers are great, but just who are your followers? I decided to do a little digging on my own Twitter account to see the names behind the numbers. This was an eye-opening experience, as I discovered a huge amount of spam followers, or what I now call “spollowers!”

Spollowers are junk numbers, or what could be considered useless followers. We want to reach people, not bots! More important, we want to reach people in our target market. A quick review of my followers reveals way too many MLM tweeps and poker accounts. Something tells me that “Play_Pro_Poker,” “PokerNetStar,” and “PKRPokerPro” are not going to be visiting my website or buying any video courses anytime soon. And don’t even get me started on those “whiter teeth” tweeps!

The point is that all the spam and spollowers may be skewing your numbers. If you really want Twitter quality over quantity, it takes time and effort. You can’t put your Twitter account on autopilot and expect ideal followers. I’m at the point where I manage much of this manually. I cherry pick many of the folks I follow, and I review my followers to purge the junk. It’s more work, but ultimately I know I’m reaching followers, not spollowers! So how many followers do you really have?

Related Posts

• Clean Up Your Tweetstream
• Find Time to Understand Twitter’s @Reply Feature
• Find Time to Explore Your Inner Twitter
• 3 Twitter No-No’s
• 4 Simple Steps to Get Your Business on Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Computers/Technology, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.