Quality not quantity

I remember back in the days of MySpace when all that mattered was the coolness of your background and the cuteness of your profile picture. There was even an unspoken service where you could add someone who guaranteed they could get you more friends. More online friends equals a better experience, right?

Being somewhat new to Twitter, one of the things I love most about the medium is that it simply does not matter how many followers you have, or how many people you are following. With Twitter it’s the quality, not the quantity which shows the great potential that it has to be a tool for the professional world.

Sometimes I see comments on celebrity feeds I shamelessly follow that practically spam the tweet with “follow me for 200 followers” copied and pasted a hundred times. Why? What’s the point of having so many followers? Chances are they don’t even offer any decent content, just a bunch of “this burrito is delicious #yummy” or “just brushed my teeth LOLZ #suds” tweets that would only take up scroll space on my feed.

One great analogy I read from this article from Aaron Gottlieb from PR Daily (who I follow on Twitter, in fact) is: “Michael Jordan wasn’t great because of the number of people who bought his jerseys. He earned greatness through his play. Everything else was a reward.” That makes perfect sense to me.

The bottom line is that if you make your Twitter input something that’s valuable to other people, eventually people will find you and see that you offer information from which they can benefit. I don’t follow CNN or my local news provider because I want to be cool, it’s because I enjoy reading the things they tweet and it makes me more aware of the world around me.

I think if Twitter members saw social media that way then we would all be a little less annoyed whenever we check in with the little blue bird.