I noticed something about Twitter users with huge followings: they typically follow very few people. Why is this? Seems to me that they are using Twitter as part of their brand, as a place for them to be, rather than as a tool for them to benefit from. They’re not there to collect news, or get stock updates, or follow their favorite personalities …they are those personalities. How do you make this leap?
I did a little study. Of the top 100 user names on Twitter with the most followers, how many people do they follow? Here are some interesting stats:
- The top 20 users have an average of 1,015,599 followers (that race to 1 million seems kind of old now, huh?)
- 16 of those users follow less than 500 people themselves
- Statistically, there is no correlation between the number of followers of the top 100 and the number of updates they’ve kicked out (r-squared = -0.06 for the nerds)
- 82 of the top 100 follow less than 0.5% of the number of followers they have
- Those 82 have an average of 616,456 followers while only following an average of 259 people
One user I follow, @doshdosh, writes some excellent stuff about Twitter, and online marketing in general. I stumbled across @doshdosh when I was searching for relevant Twitter articles to see if I wanted to get on Twitter or not. While I’d suggest going to the site and consuming all of the articles there (doshdosh.com), there’s a great point about the top personalities on Twitter made in this piece:
“…these Twitter users built their large audience through their already established popularity. They didn’t start from the ground up: it’s likely that they started with a decent amount of followers and will continue to accumulate them passively through the strength of their reputation or personal brand.”
Of course, you’re saying, you can’t follow more than a few dozen people and have a manageable timeline anyway. Follow 377,644 people like Britney Spears, and there’s a good chance you can’t read everyone’s updates in your timeline (just guessing). And there even seems to be a limit of about 2000 followers on Twitter, meant to keep people from mass-following to get mass-followers.
But whether these massively popular users could follow many people or not doesn’t really address what I’m going for here. It’s about how you perceive someone when they have lots of followers, and follow few people.
Now think about this: say you’ve never heard of someone (i.e. they’re not a celebrity), and you find their profile on Twitter, and see they have 450,000 followers. You probably think: “wow, this person is popular.” But then you look at their “friends”, and see they follow only 200 people… are you more or less likely to follow them? Does the “strength of their reputation” hinge on how few people they follow? Is there a snob appeal in saying “I have thousands of followers, and I can do it without following thousands of people”? And more importantly, does that make you want to be part of that following?
My own personal rule is that if someone doesn’t engage their followers (look at their timeline and look for the “@”; no @’s, no engagement), I don’t bother following them. I’m the kind of person that likes to interact. Should it matter if I’m a “big-time personality” on Twitter or not? I don’t think so. If I’m interested in your topic and make a pithy comment or ask you an intriguing question, I expect a response.
But not everyone is that way. Some follow you to get followed, some just want to listen, and some just want to talk. I want my Twitter experience to be engaging, informational, and about sharing with others.
