Oh Look – It’s About Guy, Twitter and Quality vs Quantity. Again. Yay.

This morning I decided to scan some headlines in my RSS Reader, because that thing is Sorely Neglected since I’ve started using Twitter.

And I came across an article contributed by Rich Brooks, who you can find on Twitter.

He wrote an article called Why Guy Kawasaki Is Wrong About Twitter | Social Media Strategies for Small Business | Fast Company – here’s a clip:

I was recently reading a post from Guy entitled How to Use Twitter as a Twool. There’s a bunch of great advice in the post, but I found one piece of advice that I just couldn’t swallow:

“Get as many followers as you can. I recently explained what I do to get more followers. Ignore people who tell you that it’s the quality of your followers not the quantity. They’re trying to make friends, not use Twitter as a tool. And, truth be told, there are only two kinds of Twitter users: those that want more followers and those that lie. You can follow me here.”

Mr. Kawasaki, for the record, my pants are not on fire. Twitter is the Swiss Army knife of communication tools; not everyone needs that big ol’ knife to get the job done.

I’ll take a little bit of a departure of the conventional wisdom – Guy is partly right. I want more followers. I’d love to have a million followers one day, that might be cool.

I also know that it’s STILL about the quality of followers. Still, as the writer notes, in some industries, quantity isn’t totally bogus either. Aside from people who don’t use Twitter for business, I don’t recall anyone in any article I’ve ever read say that quantity doens’t matter at all.

And I’d love if everyone would stop painting the detractors that way.

What we’re saying, if I may speak for those who share this philosophy, is this: just like with targeted traffic, you need a good balance of quality and quantity. IE – if I sell furniture, having 10,000 teenage followers is a crappy strategy.

I’d do better with 1000 home owners.

Now if I can GET 10,000 or even 100,000 home owners? All the better. The point is not to SACRIFICE quantity IN FAVOR of quantity.

Everyone clear?

Can we stop talking about Twitter for 20 minutes now?

Or at least, if we’re going to have a discussion about Twitter, can you tell me what YOU think? Leave a comment or hit the retweet button, and I’ll follow the discussion back to Twitter.

Don’t forget to tweet Rich about how cool his article is.