Not all "Twitistics" are meainingful, most are are simply "mind-candy"

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read tweets from various tweeters proclaiming the size of their follower list, the number of direct messages they have, and percentages of this and that. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that, from time to time, I felt a bit of follower envy, however, after some thought and discussion with Jacqueline Ng,  I wondered what the big deal was. Do these stats really mean anything?

Like most statistics (though in this case, we’re dealing with population parameters), Twitter statistics (or “Twitistics” as I like to term them),  lack a point of reference for me. For instance, what does “65% @replies” actually mean? Is it someone engaging with many members of their community or is it a few lengthy back-and-forths with old school friends? And what does “engaging” actually mean to different tweeters? What was the original purpose of a user’s Twitter feed in the first place? Does the Twitter feed belong to a corporate brand, or a mother at home? What’s needed here is a point-of-reference, otherwise, why should we care?

Though I know first hand about the thrill of seeing my follower figure pass certain milestones,  all that is artificial. I know that the number of followers I have is meaningless just like the number of “hits” my website gets. What’s important here are the metrics that I value, as opposed to generic meaningless ones.

For instance, my personal goals on Twitter are to exchange ideas with others in the fields of web design/development, marketing, business and higher education, and to market my skills to potential employers (talk about transparency). Thus the metrics I value are:

• the number of followers I actually have interesting conversations with and
• the number of followers I have that hold positions of influence at companies I’d like to work for.

And metrics I don’t pay too much attention to are:

• Number of DMs
• Number of followers, etc

Furthermore, since these are my personal goals, I don’t feel the need to advertise them because these numbers have meaning only to me, while all the other numbers don’t and are just mind-candy.

So the next time you think about tweeting something like “I need only 1 more follower to crack 2000″, think about:

1. Does this 1 more follower actually mean anything to you?
2. How tweeting something like that reflects on you, i.e., will you come across as someone who values a followers opinion? or will you come across as a shallow person trying to simply build their follower list?