Twitter, are you a numbers jockey?
You wake up in the morning, whats your first thought?
“I GOTTA GET MORE FRIENDS”
Who lives like this?
Well @katelawson worries about getting to 100, @eatingLA begs to hit 1000, and @megalucklylady views @carrie as a hero because she has 10,000.
These people really completely miss the value in twitter.
“Popularity is not an indication of quality.” Vanna Bonta
Check out this search for “followers” on Summize, its seems to be everyone’s biggest worry and I just don’t get it.
We now have the usual Social Meeja whores advising us on programs to get to 10,000 followers in 30 days, can it be done? yes, absolutely but you will have built up a community of 10,0000 idiots just like you.
Your twitter stream is a community of friends, why would you infect it with this bullshit, would you do this in real life?
I am positive you wouldn’t.
Take for example the famous twitter purge of spammers this week, where people lost 100′s of followers or practically 10% of their friends, I lost slightly over .01% and I had to even check that using some numbers tool.
I never watch numbers, I watch content, I like what friends do and what they recommend to me.
Thats Twitter’s value to me.
Whats Twitter’s value to you? are you a number jockey?
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11 comments...What do you think?
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Twitter: shanekny - Four years on Twitter today
Twitter: shanekny - When twitter goes ugly
Twitter: shanekny
I agree, more people are worried about how many they have following them. I have 540 followers coupled with over 10,500 updates. I see people with 3,000 followers with only 3, 000 updates. I often wondered why that was? I have a hard core of followers that I like to interact with. Good banter along with content that interests me. I bet that most of the ones with large followings probably have the same hard core as me. The word “Ego” comes to mind.
Well said – totally agree.
Totally with you on this one, I cannot understand HOW people think the stuff they’re doing could be beneficial for themselves, or anyone who follows them.
I was intrigued to work out the percentage of followers I lost- it works out at 0.25% I think most of those would’ve been from when i started out and wasn’t as ruthless about blocking people. I’ve found that if you let some people follow they’ll contaminate my twitter stream- by following people I’m following/ are following me, and spamming them too!
I’m happy to have lost them.
Quality is always preferable to me than quantity, and medium to long term always pays way more.
You just are noticing this now? Twitter caused this by its own actions. It’s yet another reason why I like FriendFeed more.
Twitter: simonprepublic
26th July, 2009 at 11:02 am
This is so true, I was only saying yesterday on Twitter that it is about quality of followers not quantity.
What a worthless post. How is it supposed to get me some more followers?
In all seriousness, hilariously good stuff. I love it. How do people not get this?
Everyone knows a loser or two who is obsessed with follower numbers. It’s tiresome, but easily ignored.
That said, I find nothing wrong with people getting excited to reach a certain number of followers. @eatingLA – who is a real person, Pat Saperstein, whom I know in real life – actually was just thanking her followers. I don’t see what’s so objectionable about this. They’re enjoying it, good for them. Doesn’t necessarily make them number jockeys.
I’d rather have actual conversations (on Twitter and off Twitter) with three amazing people than be followed by one million. As it happens, I get to have conversations with a lot more than that. The follower obsessives can sit in the corner tugging away at their knobs – doesn’t bother me a bit as long as they keep their mess away from me.
The asymmetry in the following/ follower numbers is an important but often ignored aspect of Twitter. I just cannot have meaningful conversations, even snippets of conversations with 1000s of people. Just as I do not have 1000s of friends in real life. I follow a much smaller number than most do because they add value in disproportionate heaps.
So I guess I am a numbers jockey but not in the way (I think) you define it. I work to keep my “following” number _low_ and meaningful – to me, obviously. My criteria for following are public (at least two of these four) – original, informative, interesting and dialectic. Reciprocity is not one of them but I am glad to have conversations with you, Mr P and Ms Danicki often. And I ruthlessly block spammers, pornsters and marketers of products I have no interest in (cigarettes, I-can-make-you-rich, I-coach-you-to-eternal-happiness all fall in the same BS basket from my point of view). That keeps “follower” numbers low too.