Since the day anyone hears about Twitter for the first time, they would sure at some point think about how to gain more followers. Well, it is normal to think this way, but it’s time to stop.

People write all kinds of articles about growing Twitter followers, authors sell books about it, companies switch online tactics only to increase Twitter followers, and see the number of followers as one of the major KPIs. Truth is, does it really matter that much?

Fulfill the Desire for Power

Number of followers even slowly turns into a form of power and intelligence, also created all these “social media gurus”.  People automatically assume and feel like they suddenly have so much influence to the society they are in just because they have a few thousands of followers.

Connect it with Psychology

I’ve met people from industry networking events who are “social media gurus”, they are all so similar. They love to talk about the number of followers on Twitter, they love exposure and recognition and yet they haven’t achieved much in life. It’s all about the lack of self-confidence, their effort in other areas/ fields might not be noticed and they feel like the number of Twitter followers can somehow turn themselves into someone respectable. Virtualista actually had a great post about personal branding and social media guru.

Solution: Quality not Quantity

If Twitter is one of the channels in your company’s social media strategy, size of your audience is important, but number of followers however, does not represent the size of your audience. If you always tweet with links, the easiest way to track audience is to check the click through rates of the tweets, they are usually very consistant. To do so, you can use URL shorteners, one of the tricks that I always use is to add a “+” sign after bit.ly urls (e.g. http://bit.ly/d7PugD+ ), or simply post a twitpic and see how many views you get.

Photo Credit: KaranV @Flickr