The Twitter Follower Delusion

On Twitter, followers are like money you can’t spend. They are like money because they have zero intrinsic value, and are only worth something because some people agree they are worth something. But of course you can’t trade your Twitter followers to someone else who agrees with you that they have value.

“No intrinsic value”??? But every person that sees my content is valuable!

First of all, no. If you’re writing in Hindi, or on a college level, and the person that sees your content reads no Hindi, and on a fifth-grade reading level, the fact that your content passes beneath his gaze means nothing.

Second, you’re assuming that “followers” on Twitter actually see anything you write.

Guy Kawasaki is “following” 163,812 people. If he spent one second per twit and each of his followeds twitted once per day, it would take him 45 hours to review a day’s twits. I think we can safely say that Kawasaki doesn’t read 99% of his “friends’” twits; as a follower, Kawasaki has no intrinsic value.

Maybe, but Kawasaki is an aberration. Most people don’t follow that many.

Do you suppose that anyone “following” a thousand people is actually reading his “friends’” twits? I suspect not.

I recently built an application that allowed me to select a twitterer, and automatically force all of that twitterer’s followers to unfollow me. I selected a few twitterers of the “picture of Britney giving a blowjob” variety, and ran the application on them.

I promptly lost a third of my paltry 700 followers. That means that 200 people following me were also following spammers who contributed nothing.

That they were following the spammers revealed to me that they didn’t care about what their “friends” (Twitterspeak for those they are “following”) were saying.

So why were they following me? Probably in hopes that I would boost their follower number by following them back. And there’s the heart of the matter: many on Twitter don’t decide whom to follow based on the interestingness of their content, but only in hopes of boosting their own follower numbers; these are followers without value.  Or, as @KevinOKeefe says, “just because someone has a lot of followers on Twitter does not mean they are offering anything of value“.

Guy Kawasaki apparently can’t conceive of more followers as anything but better:

I check on my TwitterCounter stats so many times a day that it scares me. I don’t think it’s just me that does this because there are only two kinds of Twitter users: those that want more followers and those that are lying.

It’s a game; I get that. But Twitter followers—like World of Warcraft gold or Monopoly money or U.S. greenbacks—aren’t worth anything to people who aren’t playing the game. The Twitter Delusion is that they are.

I love games, and sometimes wish I could afford to play them more. But playing games has costs, whether direct costs or opportunity costs. If the game depended on merit, so that the price of more Twitter followers were to produce more interesting relevant conduct, I might give it a shot—producing interesting relevant conduct requires thought and creativity, two faculties that I could afford to exercise more.

But if the cost of having another follower is to give my imprimatur to someone whom I am not interested in following, I’m not going to play.

Why care? If you have 700 followers, and 250 of them are never going to pay attention to a word you write, why does it matter? You should just be grateful for those who will pay attention and not try to change things.

It probably doesn’t, and I probably should.

But imagine a Twitter (or a subTwittersphere) in which people only follow each other if they might be interested in what they had to say. The spammers go away (or spend all of their time twitting each other), and the rest of us can more easily find a community of shared interest without having to weedwhack our way through the “Trump Network” and “TweetAddder” spambots and spamorons.

Ah, the potential!