Why Quantity is Better Than Quality When It Comes to Twitter Followers
Keith Luscher wrote an interested blog article about why it is better to have a smaller but more engaged group of Twitter followers than a larger but less engaged group of followers. Keith is great and I normally agree with his opinions, but on this one we diverge.
There are definitely two schools of thought on this issue and both have merit. One group follows Keith's opinion and emphasizes quality versus quantity when it comes to Twitter followers. They believe that the results they see from having a smaller but more engaged group of followers is greater than if they had a larger but less engaged group of followers. I respectfully disagree.
We have two Twitter accounts. The first one, http://www.Twitter.com/StevenRothberg has close to 10,000 followers and the second, http://www.Twitter.com/EntryLevelJob, is closing in on 20,000 followers. Combined, we therefore have close to 30,000 followers. We tweet links to articles and jobs on our site and other sites one to two dozen times per day and those tweets generate dozens and sometimes hundreds of links to our site a day. Google sees those links and understands that we are an authoritative source of information about careers so ranks us higher in the search results for those search terms. In addition, the tweets and re-tweets from our almost 30,000 followers generates a lot of traffic to our site. Twitter is one of our highest sources of traffic and the thousands of visits we get per day don't cost us a dime.
Would we have all of that benefit if we had 100 very passionate followers? No way. What if we had 10,000 very passionate followers? Sure. A large number of very passionate followers is likely better than a slightly larger number of passive followers, but the choice usually isn't so marginal. It is usually between a lot of passive followers or a few passionate followers. It is kind of like a rock band having the choice between playing in front of 10 very passionate fans in a backyard or 18,000 somewhat interested fans in an arena. Almost every band will take the arena any day and I suspect that Keith would too if faced with that choice.
I'd like to link to this post. I would have agreed with Keith. I have close to 600 followers now on Twitter and I've been building it steadily for a few months. I do a lot of online writing. I just felt the numbers wouldn't necessarily result in re-tweets if they weren't in the target market. But maybe it's because narrow demographics don't matter on Twitter as much as, say, direct mail!
Are you saying it really is a numbers game? Maybe most people on Twitter fit your niche then and it's wide enough. Thanks for the post.
Keith and many other people that I also respect a lot have an honest difference of opinion with me when it comes to Twitter. They feel that it is better to focus on quality rather than quantity of followers. I believe that it is better to focus on quantity rather than quality of followers because when your quantity is high, you'll likely still get the same or perhaps even more quality followers plus the additional non-quality followers who occasionally re-Tweet your postings and just by their sheer numbers make your Tweets more relevant. The more followers you have, the more relevant your Tweets are in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Note that my references to "quality" has nothing to do with the people or even their content but instead their level of engagement. Those who follow you and never re-Tweet or click to go to your recommended links are passive and therefore non-quality followers. Those who re-Tweet, click your links, etc. are quality followers because of their higher level of engagement. If you get enough followers, a certain percentage of them are bound to be quality even if your percentage of non-quality exceeds that of Kevin's or the other believers in quality over quantity.