10,000 Followers (and counting?)

Well, we did it! 10,000 followers! The momentous occasion happened at 1:27am this morning. I sat at my computer impatiently hitting the reload button on my browser (what a loser eh?) until I watched the "9,999" turn into "10,000". It was quite exciting, I suppose. Not exactly a Times Square ball-dropping party, but worth a 'woo-hoo' at least. And all the more impressive considering it all happened in less than 2 months. We started our little journey on May 30th with our original 3 followers, and here we are less than 60 days later with over 10,000 more. Wow! It shows the virality of the Internet (is 'virality' a word?).

Of course, our journey was not without its bumps in the road. The fact my account was suspended for several days caused a bit of anxiety and threatened the entire project. My bright idea to totally piss off my followers by dropping them from my following list gave us a few anxious moments, and sent our numbers into a temporary nose-dive. But in the end, I think we learned a thing or two and took some of the mystery out of what is essentially a pure numbers game. Want to learn what I know? Just buy my book....no, I'm kidding. This was an 'experiment' and the results are worth sharing, free of charge. Read on....

Twitter is an excellent communications tool. It's brief and simple to use. It's easy to support on any Internet-connected device, including a mobile phone. That's its charm. Another thing that sets it apart, is that it supports a uni-directional following concept. By that, I mean that you can follow me regardless of whether or not I choose to follow you. This has its uses. I can choose to follow a celebrity, or a trusted information source, or a close friend. I can then easily see everything they post. Where this elegance breaks down is when you start to follow too many people. Why would you follow a large number of people? Well, the sad answer is that you can engage in a kind of mutual understanding that partners you with someone in a sort of "I'll follow you if you'll follow me" relationship. The only value this brings, is to increase your numbers, and your perceived popularity. What you do with this 'power' (sell it to marketers, lord it over your friends, whatever) is a totally different matter. Still, the seduction of having a large number of followers is a very real attraction.

If you choose to have a 'give me all the followers I can get' type of presence on Twitter, you can basically say goodbye to your 'friends' stream as having any value to you. It's too totally clogged with Internet marketing crap and all kinds of 'come to my web site' spam to be useful to you. Ditto for the Direct Message inbox. My DM inbox has 5,787 messages! That's right, 5,787. That means I get an average of 100 per day. I've looked, and basically NONE of these is sent to me by someone I know or care about. They're all junk. (This would be a good time to remind people that if you REALLY want me to read your DM, you might want to send me an @ message telling me so, or I'll never see it. I just don't bother looking at my DMs as a rule.)

If you choose to keep your friends list limited to your actual friends, you will have an entirely different experience on Twitter. But unless you're a popular celebrity, don't expect your follower numbers to be very high.

This dichotomy (big word eh?) of Twitter account types makes me curious about the other side. What if I dropped ALL my spam followers and only kept my real friends and those I cared to hear from? Would my follower list drop like a stone and balance itself with my friend count? Perhaps we should find out?

So this brings us to the interesting question of 'what to do next?' Should we keep building the follower count as high as it will go? How high is that anyway? Or have we proven the point that we could reach the target number by diligently concentrating on things that improve follower count? Is it time to knock down our sand castle (house of cards, etc.)? I'd love to hear your opinion on it. Either comment here, or send me a tweet.

Followers: 10,535
Following: 10,545
Updates: 256
Rank: 4,039th

Let's take a closer look at the numbers. Very impressive for 2 months if I do say so myself. 10,535 is a big number! The NY Islanders hockey team averaged 9,748 home fans in 2000. Imagine every person at an NHL game following everything you say online. Wow!

Notice how the TFF (Twitter Follower/Following) Ratio is almost exactly 1.0. It's clear that this equilibrium happens naturally. Note also that it appears you can accomplish this volume of followers with relatively few tweets. 256 (GREAT computer number, isn't it?) is a very small number compared to many in this class. Most Internet marketers tend to FLOOD the stream with comments and re-tweets in order to keep their name on your screen for as long as possible. Most have orders of magnitude more updates (tweets) than I do.

Another interesting observation is the rank. Being in the top 4,000 perhaps doesn't sound too impressive until you remember that we started at over 2.2 millionth! The public isn't privy to how many Twitter users exist (Twitter isn't telling), but since Ashton Kutcher has approximately 3 million followers, the number must conservatively be at least 4 million. To be in the top 4,000 out of 4 million is therefore being in the top 0.1%. If the Twitter number is 8 million, I would then be in the top 0.05%. I'll take being in the top 0.1% in the world at anything (well, anything good at least). In other words, put 1,000 random Twitter users in a large banquet hall, and I would likely have the most followers of any of them. (I know some stats geek is going to nail me on that one, but it makes my general point.) Again, it's a pretty impressive stat, although when I started this journey 2 months ago, a person with 10,000 followers was 1,500th on the list. It just goes to show how fast Twitter is growing.

So, the bottom line is.... If you're looking for a large number of followers, one way to do it is to find lists of other people with large numbers of friends and follow them (they're the most likely to follow you back). You won't know who they are or care about what they have to say, but chances are they will agree to follow you in this mutual follow relationship, and both your numbers will go up. Continue that as much as you can. Remember that once you hit 2,000 friends, you can only follow people if you have a similar number of followers. This will slow you down a bit. You'll have to stop following people that haven't followed you back until you regain that TFF ratio near 1.0. The other thing to remember is that if you're using automated tools to help you, you risk being nailed by the Twitter police (they don't like people 'gaming' the system strictly to drive their numbers up), and you only get 150 API calls to their server per hour, so use them wisely. You'll also hit limits on how many people you can follow per day. And finally, there's no substitute for being interesting and worth following. I like to think I got most of my 10,000 followers on my charm alone. :-)

I think that's about all you need to know. I'm happy to answer any specific questions you have, just post them here, or @ message me on Twitter. And don't forget to tell me what you think I should do with this blog. I do have "100000followers.blogspot.com" reserved in case we feel like shooting for the next plateau!

Thanks for joining me on my journey and reading this blog. And as always, don't forget to follow me on Twitter! twitter.com/campbed

Don