Do You Care About Follower Counts?

January 29, 2010 – 9:20 AM | Comments

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Home » Twitter

Do You Care About Follower Counts?

Submitted by Jeff Weisbein on April 16, 2009 – 3:13 PM Comments

TechCrunch just published an article titled “Should Twitter Remove Its Follower Count” which lead to me to the following question: do you care about your (or someone elses) follower count? I mean, honestly, does it bother you if someone has more followers than you do? I know this all may seem elementary to a certain degree, but, I can almost guarantee people are bothered by this whole follower situation. Here are my personal feelings on the subject and I’m curious to know yours so leave a comment.

First and foremost, I’m going to come out and say, I believe my followers are important and I am always trying to gain more of them. Second, it does bother me when my “competitors” (if you will) have a larger following than I do. However, I believe this makes me more competitive and at the end of day benefits me, not them. I am always looking to improve my blog, forums, community at large to build the greatest (best) community on the web – not just in the tech field either – I’m talking the best community ever. Whether I can accomplish that is another story, but it won’t stop me from trying my best.

That being said, I occasionally have to stop myself and say, “Jeff, you’re only 19 – stop and look around at what you have built and done.” Not that I’m the only 19 year old who has built something like this, but, I believe it’s special to anyone who can accomplish something at this age. Anyway, back to the followers thing.

There is one thing that truly bothers me more than anything about Twitter followers and that one thing is when someone such as @kevinrose (who is probably a really great guy – not just picking on him) follows only a small fraction (not even 1% of them) of his followers back. If you want an account just for you and certain people then have a separate account. I’m not trying to say how people should manage their accounts, but come on what happened to netiquette? I know it isn’t only me who believes it’s common courtesy to follow someone who’s following you on Twitter. For example, my friend @chrispirillo makes an attempt to follow everyone who is following him – he gets it! He gets it better than anyone else I know. Interaction and community building is essential to online success – don’t put yourself in a corner where only privileged people can find you.

I’m done (for now). Feel free to follow me (@besttechie) and leave me a comment!

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Tags: Followers, Social Networks, Twitter, Web 2.0

Wanyal
Its who follows you, not how many.

That said. I think Twitter should remove the follower count.

besttechie
@Wanyal: I can agree with the first part. If someone who has a lot of sway follows you and retweets your tweet, your audience can double, triple, or more. So yes, I agree with that for sure. I'm not sure about the second part yet, I have to think about the pros and cons more.

Dustin Sabecky
I find that following EVERYONE that follows you isn't always the best idea. Just because someone follows you, doesn't mean you know them (or want to). In the case of @kevinrose, his account IS his own account, why should he make an account just for people to follow? That's what Facebook Fan Pages are for. If you deem it necessary to follow everyone that follows you, it's your own prerogative, but it is up to the user, not "netiquette". I think they should keep follower counts because there is no reason to remove them.

okelay
I care about who I follow and who's following me, not how many. of course hitting a threshold, like 500 or so it's cool, but I don't think it's that important.

I don't follow everyone who follows me.
I guess that if ,like @chrispirillo or @kevinrose you use your twitter account to promote your site, you should, but I use mine for fun,mostly. for talking to people and expressing my thoughts. I like to follow people who are or seem interesting, who'd actually add something to my timeline and with whom I can talk.

well,that and I follow a few feeds and celebrities and fictional character, who fall in the 'adding something interesting to my stream' part.

@Stephenfry tries to keep up with the followers and often replies and that is very much appreciated. people,celebrities or otherwise famous people who don't even bother, don't make the best impression. not on me,anyway.

Bill W
It is important to post the followers. It gives power to the people.

For example: I know someone who could not get a cust service issue resolved. Fed up she posted it to twitter. Within 5 minutes the company was following her and 2 minutes later was sent a DM that said contact us at ... They took care of her problem.

They know how fast word can spread. Keep posting the amount of followers.

kevinnunez
getting twitter followers is easy. Building a community on twitter is whats hard. You can create a random user and get over 2,000 followers in 3-4 days. All ya gotta do is generate random tweets from a Twitterfeed RSS by making an RSS feed with the most popular hashtags, then just follow a CRAPload of people, and boom soon you'll be on your way to thousands of followers.

Lawrence
Yeah. I appreciate my followers, but I question those who use twitter purely to promote themselves.

Gathering a following is a beautiful thing, but I don't think gathering them to form 'an army of hitcounts' is the right direction to go in.

I love that a 16-year-old can have just as many followers as a 19, 30 or even 60-year-old. Just use the service - if you get followers, it's a bonus; a compliment, if you will.

besttechie
@Lawrence: Good points. Thanks for the comment.

Roni
I just wrote about this myself... http://skinnyminnymedia.com/new/2009/09/24/why-...

I have to say I don't auto follow people who follow me because I was finding they'd drop me once I did just to built their own numbers. BUT If someone @'s me I do follow and normally respond. It's just polite... I agree with you.

I really find the constant focus on getting more followers annoying. It feels too much like a High School popularity contest. Just use the tool for what it's for and people will follow if you have something to offer that is meaningful to them. It's as simple as that.

besttechie
Thanks for the comment Roni. I enjoyed your post as well. I totally agree that auto following someone back isn't necessarily the right (best) way to approach Twitter (at least for most people). I try and mix a bit of personal and public into my Twitter stream and I too, like you, try and reply to most people and follow people who retweet or mention me.

Thanks for the comment!