Just a quick rant post for a change on a topic i've seen come up a lot of late.
I've been using Twitter for a number of years now, and have watched it grown from a wee nipper to the stage it is now, whatever that might be. It's brilliant and i love it. It's full of incredibly friendly and helpful individuals that are (almost) always available to help or join in on banter. I wouldn't change it, apart from one thing that's added by the users.
Ego.
Yes it's fine that you have 500 followers, honestly most of us are happy for you. The reality is over half of those will be dormant, non-participants to your conversations. They'll be people that have followed you on a whim or from a non-specific "follow friday". If they aren't participating, i think it's a little extreme to call them a "follower". I'm not stupid, and i realise that not every follower will be an extrovert that is happy to join in with what ever your chosen topic of banter is. That's fine. However, if someone has chosen to follow you, don't you think it is a wise idea to find out why they did? Try and tempt them to join in, and see what value they bring to the table?
My point is this. There are a lot of people on twitter that assume the follower count is equal to their status. Just this week i came across an example where a particular "social media guru" with tens of thousands of followers doesn't communicate with their followers. Their timeline is filled with auto-generated junk, that is there to give off the impression they're something they're not.
It's fake. It's misleading. It's egotistical.
You cannot determine the value of someone on twitter by their follower count. Nor can you determine it from the numerous tools that are popping up all over the place. The value of a tweet is subjective. The value of a twitter user is also subjective and a follow from a fellow twitter user shouldn't be taken for granted.
That "guru" probably wins business based on the fact they call themselves a "guru" and that they have a large number of naughts on the end of their follower count, but it doesn't show the value of that individual. So, in a way, the number of followers is probably exagerating the effectiveness of that individual. I think this is wrong (i may be alone, please comment below!)
I honestly don't care if you have a million followers or just four. I care simply about whether or not you're contributing to the ecosystem of twitter. Help people, answer questions, find companies, join others in topics of interest; this is exactly what twitter was made for. Don't fill twitter with ego, facebook is bad enough for that. Come to think of it, LinkedIn falls foul of a little bit of ego-stroking every now and again.
Let's try and keep twitter personal, friendly and honest, eh?