The Follower Count Curse
It’s all about numbers.
Spam is about numbers. Multi-level marketing (MLM) is about numbers. Pyramid schemes are about numbers. They all rely on the raw power of massive numbers to turn their purveyors a nice profit.
In the world of spam, it involves blasting out millions of email messages in the hopes that some minute percentage of misguided souls will click, buy, or reply. In MLM or pyramid schemes it’s usually about recruiting more people to join in, and encouraging them to do the same, thus creating a massive and profitable “downline”. Whatever the specific program, offer, or other carrot, it all boils down to whoever can generate and leverage massive numbers.
And so it goes with Twitter, and we have the Follower count to thank.
Originally, the number of people who were following a given account was a nice, simple proxy for quality – a fast way to tell if an account was just a spammer or actually provided some value. Someone followed you, so you popped over to their profile page and eyeballed their following/follower/post counts.
If they were following thousands and yet had only a few dozen followers, chances are they were try to play the “auto-follow” numbers game (unsuccessfully now that most people keep that turned off) or otherwise were hoping that some small percentage of people they followed would click on the link in their profile or within their few updates. A variation on the spammers game.
However, with the advent of the MLM game on Twitter – I’m looking at Twitter Getter here (not going to direct link to it) – that little eyeball quality check is no longer useful. Someone can follow only a few people, and net out thousands of followers as a result (or so the theory goes). To paraphrase someone I follow on Twitter, you follow a few people you don’t care about in order to get thousands of followers who don’t care about you. Lots of numbers, but no context for any kind of enduring social relationship – which is kind of the point of social networking, at least for the people I like to follow.
Why would people fall into this? Why would this kind of “service” gain any kind of traction? Because it’s all about the numbers. Even for those who aren’t out to spam links, there is a twisted status inherent in having a lot of followers on Twitter, a status elevated if you didn’t have to follow thousands to get there. People, many I think innocently, perceive a real reputation value on Twitter of having huge follower counts, even if the implied relationships are built on a bogus foundation.
And why not? Everywhere you go in the world of social media, status is defined all to often by the numbers – number of blog subscribers via Feedburner, number of connections via LinkedIn, number of friends on Facebook, number of comments or views on YouTube, and so on.
In some cases I think that’s fine – if you are building out a professional content blog funded by advertising revenues, then having tens of thousands of (legit) subscribers is critical. If you are a company using Twitter as a one-way broadcast tool for your discount deals (which is a completely legitimate use of Twitter if done right), then cranking up the follower count is a key intermediate goal.
It’s on the miguided “massive followers/friends/connections = more valuable personal reputation” level that MLM’s like Twitter Getter thrive. It’s tempting for both people hoping to turn around and claim “I got 10,000 followers in 30 days, hire me as an expert” as well as less predatory folks who are overly attached to the numbers as a measure of self-worth.
We’re all guilty of it, glorifying those who manage to crank up the numbers. Those who have huge follower counts because of their real world reputations or awesome Twitter content streams may have rightly earned the glorification. Unfortunately many people get it backwards and see the high follower counts as a key driver of that well-earned reputation, which leads to the current unhealthy obsession with driving their own numbers up.
What would happen if Twitter actually hid follower counts? It wouldn’t stop the spammers, but maybe it would lessen the obsession for many. Kind of a sacrilegious idea in the numbers-driven world of social media, I know, but it’s at least entertaining to ponder how it would affect behavior of the tweeting masses.
