Yeah. They’re talking about Twitter again.

From The Twitter Fantasy | Collaboration 2.0
| ZDNet.com

I smell Beanie Babies, Housing Bubbles and Dutch Tulip Manias – there’s a frenzy around followers that will boom and bust.  Few people know why these various followers are of value apart from to try and sell to them, often in a way that would be very at home on the home shopping channel, ideas, services and stuff.

It’s already bust among the savvy. The problem is the savvy folks are not the majority of the general population.

So here’s a question; if you’re on Twitter for business, should you care about the number of followers you have?

The short answer is no.

You could have one million followers – if they aren’t likely to retweet, buy, click, subscribe, or take other direction from you, it just plain doesn’t matter. You might as well have one follower, you.

The long answer: it depends on who you are and what your market is.

There are some brands doing amazing things with Twitter, and the number of followers they have shows a genuine interest in their brand.

Look at the Barack Obama account. You’d think since his people made no tweets between election day and the few days before he got elected, the number would have gone down dramatically.

Instead they’ve tripled since November. That’s insane. That’s brand loyalty. 

I don’t care what your political views are – there isn’t an entrepreneur alive who wouldn’t want to triple their following by saying almost Nothing.

So, if who you are is a strong brand that people want to feel close to, those numbers mean something. Tripling your numbers means something if the people following you are mostly doing it because they want to hear anything you might say.

Which brings us to our next point – what’s your market got to do with it?

Lots, actually.
See, if you’re an individual or business, marketing consumer products with mass appeal to the regular person, numbers matter a little. Many people will read your high numbers as a sign of popularity.

In fact, if you’re in any business where subconscious popularity cues come into play in terms of marketing, numbers will play a role – who wants to follow someone who has 8 followers?

At the same time, you have to balance that quantity with quality. 

Why?

For the same reason that you only want targeted buyers, and maybe affiliates or resellers, on your list. Anyone who is on your list that won’t someday be instrumental in sending a sale your way is dead weight. It’s nice to have high numbers that make you sound like you’re more important than you really are – if you’re just starting out and you need a bit of magic fairy dust to get people to See that you’re actually that valuable. 

But if you get people on your list who are just following you because they knew they had to follow you so they could get more followers (yeah, I’m talking about Twitter Getter) unless people who need more followers is actually your market, you’re wasting your time.

Yes, if you’re in internet marketing, and you use Twitter for internet marketing, and you sell mostly to other internet marketers, then as I’ve said before about Twitter marketing to marketers, that particular circle will be profitable for you, at least for a few minutes. 

But if you are building a business that is

• in a niche market, 
• caters to free thinking artistic types
• caters to the offline or partially online entrepreneur in any way
• has freelancers as customers
• is mostly business to business
• is mostly made up of coders
• is mostly comprised of web designers
• has a mixture of writers
• sells to other people who provide services

Then don’t build your following just to get an inflated number that doesn’t truly represent you. 

Why? Why, when numbers are so impressive to some people should you err on the side of quality?

Well, let’s think about what the desired effect is for people who want big numbers on Twitter. They want to be able to:

• Have a wider reach
• Use Twitter as a broadcasting platform, not only directly to their own audience, but through retweets
• Influence or directly control flow of traffic resulting from their own tweeted links
• Be a person who wields influence.

Of course I can’t speak for every person who wants a high number of followers, inflated or not. I’m basing this on my conversations with a couple hundred of them over the past few years, a few dozen of which actually met these goals. 

Now, look at each point above. None of those can be successfully reached with an inauthentic audience. 

You don’t really have a wider reach if the people following you are only doing it to get you to follow back, or have some other intention besides following what you say, or performing actions you desire. 

You can’t broadcast to people who probably aren’t listening – and you can bet they aren’t if they aren’t following you of their own volition. They won’t retweet under those conditions either.

You can’t influence or control traffic to links you tweet if you have followers who aren’t attentive. Again, it’s one thing to have a follower, it’s another to have one who is paying attention to you. 

You might be perceived as a person who wield influence. But you won’t have actual influence unless people are naturally drawn to you.

So eff your follower numbers. Once you get past 100, forget about them for a while. Yeah, it’s good to have goals, but think about it…. how much more money would you make if you had a subscriber list of 1000 where 50% bought every time you mailed a new special, versus a list of 50,000 with 1% buying?

Now if the work to get a quality follower that is likely to buy is equal to that of getting 100 barely interested followers who will probably never even subscribe is the same, where should your effort should be?

Guess it depends on whether you’re running a business or a popularity contest.

I’m in Austin, and with the house empty today, I was just about to put my chicken scratch into readable format for a VIP client project.

I always like to scan the news (read: my blogging neighbors) before I settle down, to see if there’s anything that merits a comment, or your attention. And today I came across a post by my pal Paul Chaney, who is organizing a formal boycott of Twitter on the 4th of July. Kind of a declare your independence thing, very jazzy.

You can read more about what he’s calling the twitcott here, but be sure and read his more recent post about his rationale for boycotting Twitter – he’s saying hands off for a day, not for life.

I’ve made my share of comments on the issue, as you can see above. And I’ve had to resort to basically the same solution to resolve it.

Still, I haven’t decided whether to formally participate with boycott yet, as 1- I will probably be offline that whole day anyway, and 2- I’ve got questions about what happens if it’s successful.

1- Should the twitcott be successful, and Biz/Evan approach the Twitter community – what are our demands? Are we generally just looking to get better service?

2- Since so many of us are using it for business, are those of us who could afford a monthly/yearly donation or fee be willing to put our money where our mouths are in some organized fashion? Maybe for a dofollow link on a donor page?

I ask these questions because I’ve always thought the Twitter issue is a resource issue – not enough hardware to handle the bandwidth, or maybe the original code doesn’t scale well to this many simultaneous users.

In other words, maybe its popularity is its peril. If so, and we love Twitter so much, and our peeps are there, why shouldn’t we kick in a little bit? (Besides, of course, the two obvious reasons. 1- They haven’t asked us to and probably won’t, and 2- we probably wouldn’t get any kind of premium service out of it.)

There’s my two cents. I have to admire Paul’s resolve to do something, rather than just mope and scream like I’ve been doing. If you decide to twitcott tomorrow, but still blog, don’t forget to de-activate Twitterfeed or whatever you’re using to send your blog posts too.