Is a huge number of Twitter followers important?

If you are a twitter user, you probably will have a couple of people following you every week. You visit their twitter page, realized that these ‘social media celebrities’ has tens of thousands of followers. You think to yourself, I should reciprocate and follow back. You are not alone. Many marketers believe that it is important to have many twitter followers – as many as possible. It helps them create a channel to broadcast, to establish their online reputation as “I am important” or it simply makes they credible. I beg to differ.

The method of mass following is common. Many ‘twitter gurus’ make a business out of this by teaching others how to increase the number of followers in a very short time. Their tools include softwares that automatically follows people, hoping that they will reciprocate. I am not saying it is wrong. I just don’t agree.

(My earlier post on “How to increase your twitter followers‘ will interest you if you are looking at building your follower base without robots and softwares.)

The number of followers is irrelevant if most of them don’t even know who you are, what you do and what you are saying. Would they care a sxxt what you are trying to ‘push’ them when you have a product to sell? I don’t think so. We heard about the success of dell using twitter to market its products, reaping in a million dollars. They did not do mass following. They offered twitter exclusive offers instead. Dell creates a reason for followers to follow them. In this sense, it is 2-way.

There are ‘contents’ that the followers are interested. It is about commitment (time & resources) because social media marketing requires commitment. It is time, money and manpower. It requires sustained efforts. I relate that to real-life socialization where you need to dedicate time and money to get out there and know more people, and be known at the same time. If all these sounds a lot to you or your boss, social media marketing may not be your cup of tea.