Twitter Follow Fever: Why The Numbers Don't Matter

Ahhhh, Back To Normal: 11 days after the Kutcher/CNN race, and Twitter hasn't crumbled, the Horsemen of the O-Prah-Colypse didn't show up, and the TwitterVerse is pretty much as it was Pre-Hoopla. Sure, Kutcher missed the point about Twitter: he's in no way the 'little guy' he portrayed himself to be, he's the Hollywood GoldenBoy he always was with a follow/follower profile that's textbook 'Celebrity' (e.g. he follows less than 0.007% of his follower population total). And sure, the Race was disruptive – hopefully those Tweeps who got caught up in the madness and inflicted their infectiousness on their follows can look back to that time as if from a fever dream and regret having been fooled into becoming a RSS feed on the behalf of someone whose overstated triumph wasn't quite the life-changing event they believed it was.

One quirk exposed by the Kutcher event to those outside the TwitterVerse and clarified for those within is this fixation on increasing follower volumes through whatever means necessary. Right now, a key TwitterVerse complaint is spamming promising “Get 30,000 followers in 30 days”, etc.

Follow The Leaders, But Which Ones?

But why is this important? The Twitter pundits who said that the 1 million follower mark made by a homegrown Twitterer would be a more meaningful event to the Internet than the @aplusk extravaganza were dead right. Some of the top candidates for that ribbon hover  around the 100,000 marker. But what does that really mean? Surely anyone with that many followers has lots of influence already with their followships...right? 

Well...I can think of at least 5 such Twitterers – all of whom I follow - whose ideologies or products I care absolutely nothing about. From my 10 weeks on Twitter (yes, I'm a relative newbie – but was on way before Oprah, thank you!), I get a sense that jacking up follower volumes is a serious commitment, but where's the benefit other than bragging rights. Something else: many of those Twitterers don't come across as distinctive personalities.  On the contrary, they can be rather benign, inoffensive, and just, you know, 'there'. NB: A notable exception is @brooksbayne: his ultra-conservative political tweeting can be polarising, but his followship numbers aren't necessarily an indicator of purist sympathetic tendencies (that an ideological agnostic such as myself follows him proves the point).

Enter the @Murnahan

An interesting Twitterer who has around 10,000 followers and is arguably more influential than most of the 100K Twitterers is Mark Murnahan. In the quest towards pulling out TwitterVerse's Excalibur sword, Murnahan's a candidate for a grass-roots King Arthur. According to @murnahan's bio, he's a SEO expert, and so far, has no plans for media domination. What's cool about Murnahan is that he truly engages his followers: as of today, he follows around 10,000, with a very high percentage of reciprocation. And his is a real, authentic personality: intelligent, inquisitive, communicative, and can be – on occasion – profoundly silly. His 'Dear Tweeps' love tweets are becoming the stuff of TwitterLore.

Murnahan: Dear Tweeps: I love you so much. If you were here I would hug you until you shart! http://bit.ly/kprDG (expand) #love

1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

(Charming! - Ed.)

Scatological insights aside, Murnahan 'gets' Twitter culture: his blog was an oasis of sanity during the Kutcher/CNN race, and his post-event analysis was quite possibly the Best In Show on the day. Being your authentic self on Twitter means that you risk alienating people, which I'm sure he does; he isn't some bland avatar precisely because he is himself. Equally, he isn't a politico-spammer or RSS feed either, he's well-rounded enough for people to connect with him. And it's this level of connection that shows what Twitter can be: a place to connect with others as well as develop a brand, where high numbers don't really count for as much as folks seem to think it does. Hopefully the TwitterVerse can get this lesson before I get yet another DM spammer promising Kutcher-like results – which brings me to my #TwitterTip for today: be yourself, don't worry about the numbers.  Especially if you wouldn't know what to do with them anyway!