May 26, 2009 by Matt Thomas
As those of us who use twitter professionally or, dare I say it, as a prop for their ego will know, followers = power. The more people that are following you, the more people you reach with your tweets. The more people you reach with your tweets, the more effectively you are able to promote yourself/your product and shape the zeitgeist in your favour.
This leads to a real quantity over quality bias amongst Twitter users as they struggle to get as many followers as possible, following absolutely anyone in the hope of getting a follow back and in turn getting many of these haphazard follows themselves. Pretty soon, and we’re talking days here, it’s possible to get thousands of followers, even if you haven’t written anything on Twitter at all.
In the short term this is good for professional users as they have a huge stable of followers to begin pushing their message on. However, there is a danger of killing the golden goose here and professional followers should all be aware that they run the risk of falling foul of the law of diminishing returns as what they’re up to promotionally begins to pollute and corrupt the user experience – the reason people go on twitter in the first place.
If less people go on Twitter there are less people to sell to. If we end up in a situation where there’s not much going on other than companies preaching at each other about their products or services then the whole thing becomes useless for any purpose, especially sales and corporate networking.
The traditional/desirable user experience on Twitter goes something like this. You go on, you write some tweets, people that like what you have to say follow you, then you browse other people’s tweets and follow people that interest you. That way, when you log on you are greeted by a list of tweets there’s decent chance of you being actually interested in.
Essentially the point is that no one actually keeps track of a thousand accounts, therefore the people that are following so many people are essentially operating contrary to the main point of twitter, actual interaction rather than spam.
So, what to do about it? Well, the only way I can see is to limit the number of people you’re allowed to follow. Admittedly, the backlash to this would be huge, though think about it, by limiting the number of followers you’re allowed to have, you assign follows a value that they have until now lacked, this would make people more careful about the people they follow, this would mean having 1000+ followers would actually mean something.
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