Earlier this week, I clicked over to the profile of a new follower on Twitter. The graphic to the left shows what I saw – over 850 followers yet not a single tweet!
To make matters more confusing, this person had been placed on lists 11 times. Was s/he a celebrity? An expert with waiting fans? As far as I can tell… no and no.
I don’t wish to pick on this unnamed person. S/he probably uses a program to gain Twitter followers and may at some point decide to tweet (and may be be great at it, though I’ll ever know – I certainly didn’t follow back).
Still, it’s hard to imagine that the folks following this person are engaged or involved in any way. They have no connection. They’re just numbers.
The same is true off Twitter – if you have Facebook fans or blog readers who simply pass by and with whom you never connect, the number by itself doesn’t matter (to see a great example of this, please check out Debra Askanase’s The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care).
Don’t get me wrong – a big number can be impressive by itself and is definitely impressive when it responds to a call to action. But it is engagement that is key to creating action when you need it.
So don’t worry about your numbers. Sure, you want them to grow… but not just for the sake of growth. You want people who engage, connect, and respond and, ideally, people who help you and your work grow, too.
And if you can get lots of ‘em, that’s fantastic, too.
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I’ve noticed this on several occasions. And how often have you seen the case where the avatar doesn’t match the tweets? Just this morning I found myself followed by a tweeter with a financial looking chart as their avatar, yet the tweets were random and frequent, with no apparent connection to each other, and certainly none relating to finance. For me the most important number is indeed the number of tweets. And if that number is not proportionate to the number of people supposedly engaged with the tweeter, either following or as followers, that is a tweeter I block!
(BTW, I really enjoy your blog. You always have something interesting and useful to say
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