What Is the Value of Getting Lots of Followers or Following Lots of People on Twitter?

On February 16 BookBuzzr.com sponsored a webinar about using Twitter for book marketing.

The webinar panel consisted of Carolyn-Howard Johnson (author of the HowToDoItFrugally series), Joel Friedlander (proprietor of Marin Bookworks), Laurel Marshfield (professional writer, ghostwriter and developmental editor), Penny C. Sansevieri (CEO of Author Marketing Experts, Inc.), and me.

The conversation was so lively that questions not answered in the webinar were addressed later by email. And although the discussion started out about

Twitter for book authors, the following exchange is relevant for anyone on Twitter.

Here is the edited email exchange between me and webinar listener Jacqueline Windh PhD, who is @jwindh on Twitter and graciously gave her permission for me to share this exchange:

Jacqueline's webinar follow-up question for me:

Interesting info that you check out each person before following them. But I see you follow over 5000 people. I am wondering how many of them you actually read the tweets of?

This is one of my concerns about getting followers: When someone who already follows thousands of people then follows me, I know it is unlikely that this person will actually read any of my tweets. So what is the advantage to me to get followers who are not reading what I say?

The important part of my question is: Then what value is it to me if Phyllis follows me but never reads what I say?

I replied:

First, those 5000+ people I follow and who follow me are not an overnight happening. This took 2 1/2 years of growing organically — slowly making connections on Twitter. And I think that the recent advent of Mashable's customized software http://paper.li — for which several people have picked up posts from my company blog — has helped increase the number of new followers for me.

And I do take into consideration how many followers someone has before following that person back. If the person has 10,000 followers and his/her topic is not related to what I tweet about, I probably don't follow back because I figure that person isn't really interested in my tweets but interested in adding to his/her follower numbers.

Here's the big advantage if someone following you has lots of followers AND these followers are related to your brand (business, book, cause):

If that person happens to share something of yours — or if you tweet to that person and he/she responds to you by your username — you will be getting in front of people who might not have otherwise found you.

And a couple of these people may click on your username, find you of interest to them, and start following you. And these people are usually qualified connections.



Jacqueline replied:

Obviously different people have really different approaches to Twitter — in what they put into it, what they want out of it, and what they do actually end up getting out of it.

I started out in Twitter thinking I would only follow people whose tweets I actually wanted to read. But then I found out about this Twitter etiquette that you are supposed to follow people back. I soon got up to 100 people I followed and found that I just could no longer read every tweet that those 100 people posted every day.


But it also seemed what's the point of following them if I don't read what they say?


My way of resolving this has been to create a private locked list of about 35 people whose every tweet I read. That way I can follow anyone who fits my criteria (I also check each one out individually; they must be at very least a real human being who tweets regularly and they must have something interesting to say, not just advertising products or only RTing).


But for the 300 or so who are not on my locked list I very rarely read anything they post. So I am questioning: What value is it for them to have me as a follower?


Or, to turn it around: What value would it be for me to have you follow me when you are already following 5000 people and I know there is only a slim chance that you will ever see any of my tweets?

I would love for others to add their own thoughts to this discussion. Please do so in the comment section below.

And you can now listen to the recording or read the entire transcript of the BookBuzzr webinar.

© 2011 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of Miller Mosaic Social Media Marketing. Download the company's free report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets" at www.millermosaicllc.com/los-angeles-s...