I was at dinner last week with a friend of mine before the Sarah Mclachlan concert and the conversation turned to Twitter. He asked me how many followers I had and much to his surprise I told him I didn’t know, that it didn’t really matter to me. My twitter clients (primarily TweetDeck) don’t readily show how many followers I have and at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter to me. If my goal was to simply increase followers I could easily have two to three times as many as I do. I typically get dozens of new followers per week but a funny thing happens when I don’t immediately follow them back: they stop following me. (This tells your something about their motivation to follow me.)
My goal for my @markgr Twitter account is to talk with other knowledgeable folks about my professional interests. If someone is not going at add significant value, I am not going to follow them back. Depending on several factors, if I don’t follow them back I may add them to one of my lists which helps me better manage my time on Twitter.
Zeldman did a great job in summing this up last year in his blog post Stop chasing followers:
The internet is not a numbers game. It’s about dialog, persuasion, and influence.
As I work with colleges on there social media strategy, metrics and ROI are always a part of the conversation. IMHO – you should not put too much emphasis on increasing the number of followers or fans. That should not be a high-level priority. Yes, there is a correlation, but your focus should be on dialog and engagement that will lead to solving business problems. You need to connect social media metrics directly to business metrics.
So let me ask you. What’s your take on the importance on the number of Twitter followers, both for you personal accounts and your higher ed accounts?
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Music note: Yes, the title of this post comes from the Genesis song. While I’m not a huge fan of the 80’s version of Genesis, the early 70’s version was fantastic. Seeing “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” in 1974 makes my “Top 10 Concerts of All Time” list.
I’ve never felt particularly compelled to follow someone just because they start following me. In terms of what I’m trying to personally get out of Twitter, I really follow people that interest me & engage me. If they deviate from that, I will typically unfollow as well.
I assume that people are following me for the same reason – that I’m informing, amusing or entertaining them in some way. They can vote with their feet at any time.
That said, I REALLY want to get to 1000 followers! 😉
My goal with @robinteractive is to learn from and chat with people in the two professional circles I work in: higher ed/web and e-mail marketing. Twitter is a great place to share ideas and, also very useful for me, provides a curated source of articles on the Web related to these professional areas of interest.
Rather than use lists to prioritize or categorize those that I follow, I keep the number of people I follow fairly small, and am truly interested in the tweets of those people.
If my goal was simply to have more followers, I’d follow a bunch of people and unfollow those that don’t follow me in return, or filter them out of the stream I actually read after they are followed.
I’m definitely not suggesting this is the best approach. Rather, it is the approach that works for me given my goals. If self-branding were more important to me, landing more consulting gigs, finding a different job, etc., I’d take a much different approach.
At the institution I work at our Twitter presence is in the form of just a few Twitter accounts (a general account, an athletic account, an account focused on a community outreach project or two), and they recycle news items via rss feeds. While some higher ed folks find the approach of RSS to Twitter distasteful, we feel it is appropriate for us given our goal: allowing people to access news items in various ways, and not committing an extensive amount of time to Twitter given various other tasks on the to-do list.
These Twitter accounts have a healthy number of followers even though they haven’t been heavily promoted, and a skim of most of these followers leads me to believe they are genuinely interested in the institution. This in turn leads me to believe we are achieving the above goal, though we could do more to promote the presence of these accounts.
The best approach to Twitter involves starting with your goals and working backwards to develop an approach to meet those goals. Without defining success, it is tough to plan for or measure it.