Britney Spears got a lot of press recently as she passed Ashton Kutcher for having the most followers on Twitter, but what is the point in having a lot of followers?

One reason to have a lot of followers is to impress your grandparents and relatives who live in rural parts of the world.   The other reason you may covet a lot of followers is that you think more followers means more influence.  I hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t work that way.  A group of researchers analyzed over 54 million Twitter accounts and concluded:

popular users who have high indegree [indegree is just fancy talk for number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions

Of course I don’t need to analyze 54 million Twitter accounts to tell you that. Follower count is a potential signal of influence but, by itself, it is a pretty lousy signal. Twitterers with a lot of followers are often hard core spammers or just really aggressive salespeople.  Getting a high follower count is super easy…just follow a lot of people who automatically follow you back. Influence may lead to a lot of followers, but a lot of followers doesn’t lead to influence.

So how do you gain influence on Twitter? You do it the old fashioned way. Do something noteworthy, say smart things, entertain people, be interesting, piss people off or make people laugh. Or you could just be Ashton Kutcher…go figure.

Post a comment.