Simone Grant

I like numbers.  I like goals and targets and benchmarks. Metrics – love them.

Some numbers are, however, more useful than others.  Twitter followers, for example, can be a useful number. But not when taken in isolation.  Same with facebook fans.

Let’s compare 3 twitter accounts:

A – is following 2200 people and has 400 f0llowers.  A quick review of their twitter stream finds that 0% of their tweets are replies or retweets. Instead they are all autotweets from a blog.

B – is following 370 and  has 400 followers. Their tweet stream shows a a good mix of @ replies, RTs, and tweets (some with links to posts).

C- is following 70 people and has 400 followers.  Their tweet stream shows mostly tweets, many with links to posts.

All three have 400 followers.  However, these are 3 brands with 3 very different twitter strategies.

Think of this the next time someone asks, “how many followers do you/we have?”