<h2?Quantity or Quality
A guest poster at Darren Rowse’s TwiTip site (since gone) posed just this question: [ Twitter Followers: Quantity or Quality? ] in January gone. I answered the question as a comment and have decided to copy it here as I feel it fits, and sums up this site too.
For me it’s actually a duopoly. For this one of my (two) Twitter accounts I want to get literally a million ‘followers’ As much to prove how vacuous, banal and spam infested Twitter is as anything else. I am working on the very real probability that 99% of Twitter is now bots, mlm/pyramid scams to get followers, and snake oil affiliates.
In manually adding (and removing) several thousand on this account and flipping through countless pages based on keywords I found barely a dozen people worth knowing, and that was a fluke as half a dozen of us landed on the same thread.
As these things go, I’d say Twitter is already dying, it just doesn’t know it! It still has life in it and potential, but the phishers and spammers wallowing in the trough of obfuscated links own it now. Darren (of ProBlogger) and others are doing OK and I’m having fun in my own way, but you have to ask yourself, how many of the decent followers are those who already know ‘you’.
For instance, of the hundred or so I follow on my proper twitter account (@ackadia) several I’ve known for a great many years, frequent their websites and blogs, meet at trade venues, get the mailings and so forth. Following me on that account with either get you ignored or blocked.
Ultimately, as ever, it comes to what you use Twitter for. For me I’m retired, I have no targets, no conversions, nothing to sell, and if you do, I ain’t interested. That said, as a result of several threads on Twitter I eventually bought the Thesis WordPress theme – even then, it was only because I’ve followed and subscribed to Copyblogger for several years.
In the end it comes to this – the ineptitude and oversights of Twitter’s owners have currently beggered it. Whether they can repair things is another matter. As it stands to get quality followers purely from Twitter you’ll need to sift though an unthinkable quantity of pond scum first.
The solution, as Problogger and others experts will attest, is to use your websites, newsletters, adverts etc to direct your existing customers to your Twitter and rely on their Retweets to expand your base. Any and all methods based on randomly pulling followers will, I guarantee, have a negative affect on any branding you have!
((Note: This was moved from milliontwits .com)