A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the importance of followers on Twitter. I made my case claiming that you don’t need a lot of followers to be successful. I realized that I was going against the grain of what is generally accepted. The reasoning is that the more followers you have the more people can help you spread the word for you. Sounds great, but is that really what is happening?
I had a hard time believing it, because I never personally watch my twitter stream. And I don’t have nearly as many followers as others do. The reactions from my readers were very interesting. Some agreed, others were not so sure. I talked to several in person, and some admitted to getting a kick out of getting more followers.
I believe that that is more a reason to get followers than anything else. You can brag about how popular you are. After all, you have this massive group of fans on your Twitter page. I know that you can have great conversations on Twitter, but in my experience as soon as you are interested in talking to a person more, you take it away from Twitter to a place where you can express yourself in more than 140 characters at a time.
You can probably tell, that I was not convinced to change my opinion based on the input I received. The opposite is more true. I wanted to actually proof my point. So, I decided to set up a brand new Twitter account and to test my hypothesis. I opened an account, put up a fake picture and started following 12 people so my account did not look entirely dead.
As you can see 2 people started following me back. Not anything to brag about. I started tweeting some general tweets from other peoples blogs and I send out some replies to tweets with an affiliate link to a product in it. There were 12 people that clicked on my Tweets and I made one sale, 23 dollars and 45 cents. I know, not anything to write home about. Except that I opened my Twitter account yesterday, did not do anything special and did not spend a dime in the process.
Obviously, it did not take any followers to achieve this. I was able to reach my target group without worrying about followers. I did not even have a group of people with like interests to count upon. Nothing. Just me and my account. I hope this makes you think a little more, if you are spending time to find people to follow or if you are worried about not having enough followers compared to someone else.
I know that there is a lot of re-tweeting going on. People say that that helps spread the word. But here again, I wonder how it helps. Because if you are not specifically searching for something, how are you going to find these tweets? It is still a needle in a hay stack. Same problem as with the original message.
Take a good look at your twitter stream. How long does a message stay on the front page of your Twitter account. And that is only relevant if you are sitting in front of your computer all day watching the messages. I know, not a realistic scenario. The more I think about it, backed by my little experiment, the more I am convinced that Twitter’s power is in the real time search and not in anything else.
Let me know what you think. Why are you using Twitter. To make money? To build relationships? How often does it happen that you have a conversation on Twitter because you stumbled upon a tweet from someone who follows you? And is this worth any time to build up your army of followers? As always, I am interested in your opinion. Whether you agree or disagree. Share it in the comments.
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