Member-only story
Let’s Talk About Follower Counts
Do you know how many of your followers are fake? Chances are, it’s a lot more than you think. As a result, following numbers are useless.
In the early days of Twitter, everyone was a self-described expert. A few people even elevated their status to guru or ninja. For someone who just wanted to connect with other people, all of these followers were a bit too fake. Want to know what it was like back then? Turn on Clubhouse.
Everyone was learning the platform and exploring the new social media landscape at the same time. The way I saw it, calling yourself an expert was really a way of self-identifying as a know-it-all or a conceited jerk. Most of them used bots to follow people with the hope they’d receive similar treatment.
For more than two years, I painstakingly analyzed every new follower and decided if they were worthy of my Twitter feed. In that time, I probably blocked roughly 500 accounts. Sure, I could have just not followed them, but for some reason, I didn’t want them following me, either. Looking back, I was probably acting like the know-it-all or connected jerk I tried to prune from my feeds.
Today, people still claim expertise they don’t have and try to engage in follow-for-follow schemes. Not to mention the…
