I know that it’s been said many times before, but you shouldn’t worry about the number of followers you have on Twitter, fans on Facebook, or whatever other social metric you’re tracking. Relationships matter more. It’s quality over quantity in a certain sense.
I think that most everyone tends to increase the number of Twitter users that they follow over time, which necessarily increases the number of posts in their stream. The perpetual stream growth means that your posts are getting squeezed out, or they will be soon. Relationships, however, will survive the stream squeeze. Taking the time to create genuine relationships with your Twitter friends will get you added to lists of favorite users or get your posts noticed more. Personally, I pay much more attention to tweets from users that I recognize and have had conversations with.
Take a few minutes today to start creating some true relationships. Pick a few of the Twitter users that you follow and strike up a convo with them and see what results you get. I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the number of people looking to interact with you. Then you should take the users that care enough about you to respond and put them in their own list so that you can always give them extra attention… they’ve earned it. That’s why relationships trump followers.
Image credit: marianNYC on Flickr
