Luis Fernandes: Online Marketing Professional for High-Tech Companies

It seems like I get at least one Twitter DM a week on how to increase followers.  I get it. More followers,  more street cred, right?

I hate to admit it, but I guess I’m a bit skeptical about pursing follower count as a valid metric for discerning quality and relevancy.  I mean, how important is follower count, anyway?  What does it really mean?

Perhaps, this is more clear if you isolate this one data point. Let’s suppose follower count captures relevancy to some degree.  If you consider relevancy as a marker for good content, then it seems logical to think that the more followers one has, the higher the content is (in terms of relevancy for a particular audience).  So, if that’s true – follower count may not be a good measurement since it doesn’t really indicate how good your content is, especially since there are many different methods – outside of good tweets-  to get followers.

This reminds me a lot of basic search engine algorithms.  Think back to the days when keyword stuffing was all you really needed to gain good rankings. We all know that if search engines used this one metric for ranking today (instead of a combination of  page rank, inbound and outbound links, etc.) search result relevancy would be poor, at best.  In the same way search engines enhanced their algorithms, it seems like combining follower count with another metric would help improve discerning quality and relevancy. This could in turn, help Twitter users find high quality posts.

Tweet count is okay for measuring engagement, but it seems a bit one sided. Engagement as measured with a tool like Twitter Grader – doesn’t really satisfy how good  your tweets are to your community. It’s more about how many tweets you’re responsible for.  As for measuring “power” – that’s basically just follower count.

So, what about RTs? This seems like one such metric that could reveal a lot about tweet and profile quality. The retweet (RT), combined with follower count, could provide a better picture of who on Twitter is actually worth following. RTs allow you to see how many times someone shared your tweet. Therefore, the more RTs you have, it seems logical to think, the higher quality tweets you have, as well. This also seems to better quantify engagement, since users are sharing your content.

This is probably not a novel idea. However, it just seemed important enough for me to mention, since, after all, I’m getting tired of seeing all those DMs on improving follower count.