Call it the million-follower fallacy.
The mania by studios, film companies and celebrities to acquire huge numbers of Twitter followers is misguided, social media experts claim. You can attract thousands, even millions of people, but that doesn't mean you've achieved the most potent measurement of social media success -- engagement.
In other words, there's a big disconect between having followers and being followed by the right people.
Part of the issue is that of the 75 million Twitter users, 25 percent of accounts have zero followers -- and roughly 40 per cent have never tweeted, according to RJ Metrics.
Retweets and mentions, which measure the audience responsiveness to a user's tweets, do not correlate strongly with number of followers, say Meeyoung Cha and Krishna Gummadi, who oversaw a recent study on the influence of follower counts for Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.
Consequently, the Twitter accounts that are followed by influencers, who in turn retweet the content to their own followings, are more valuable than those that attract masses of the disengaged.
To that end, having something interesting to see -- beyond naked self-promotion -- is probably advisable.
"Social media as a tool is where the Internet was 10 years ago. Think of today's efforts as the first websites -- which were basically brochures online," Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist,blogger, and the head of Internet startup Garage Technology Ventures told TheWrap. "Most media companies have created Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts. Then they jam their RSS feeds into these accounts; some may even have people doing manual updates and tweets. Anything beyond this is rare."
Take a look at the feeds for, say, NBC (29,328 followers) or Quentin Tarantino (55,592 followers). You'll see either frenzied self-promotion or chronic disengagement.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, exactly -- but when contrasted with the feed of, say, movie critic Roger Ebert, the missing element becomes obvious.
When Ebert lost his chin and his ability to speak as a consequence of thyroid cancer surgery in 2006, his career as a movie pundit could have been over. At the very least, it seemed doubtful that the man who once reached millions of viewers every week through his television show "At the Movies" would have to settle for a significantly lower profile. Say, as the resident film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Thanks to new media, however, Ebert's stature is higher than ever. He's built a passionate following through blogging and Twitter, mixing in thoughts on films, with frank and frequently humorous musings on life and politics. He retweets new followers, spars with adversaries and engages people in conversations. And he tweets -- a lot -- en route to 130,300-plus followers as of this posting.
It's a following he's hoping to monetize. He recently launched the Roger Ebert Club, which sells premium subscriptions to his reviews and blog posts for the princely sum of $4.99
