Yes and No. You can have thousands of followers and still be just another John or Jane Doe. It is up to you to brand yourself, engage, and influence.
People are still doing the numbers game, but where is that getting them when they find out a lot of them are empty numbers? – Nothing, that is what!
There are of course celebrities who have made it in the top on Twitter. However, there are people who have made it to the top who worked hard to get there and keep quality followers that they can interact with. It is not easy and I am not famous, but when someone from my area sees a gal from Southern Illinois have 12K in followers, that is a feat. Do I interact? – yes. Have I influenced? – yes, just see who has engaged in converation and who has reached me through Twitter that have used me as their web designer.
However, it is nothing to hugely brag about. I am grateful for the people who have interacted with me, visited my site, commented, and used my free and paid services.
What you should be asking instead of “Can I Become Famous On Twitter?” is Can I Become Successful On Twitter?” That is where you can get proof of how successful you have engaged and influenced online.
Are you seeking fame on Twitter? Are you seeking it through quantity or quality?
It's true, having tons of followers proves nothing. It's the quality of the following that counts and that only comes when you interact with real people not just pile up tons of hollow minions. However, having a nice rounded pile of hollow followers can at least be impressive enough to entice people to check you out… just make sure there is some substance there when they do!
lol… It does look impressive… though disappointing for me because I love to connect with others.
Well you can have many follower with the Right Hash Tags in Each Tweet you will have hundreds of twitter bots following you for a start. Then there are Followers that Do not Tweet anymore just Check your followers and see when the Last time they tweeted was
My recent post Low Cost Autoresponder
There are a lot of twitter bots out there. I go through my account once a month and do a quick cleanup. That, and I automatically block people who send ridiculous Auto-DMs to sell their product instead of try to engage other users.
I'm not seeking fame on twitter but I do seek influence, it's great to be able to tweet a post and get instant retweets. The pressure is on but it's all worth it.
My recent post Clarity is the Key to a Strong Personal Brand
It should not be any pressure. I am glad to hear you are seeking to influence because that will provide the success later on.
I seemed to get to 2-3k followers pretty easy, but I'm having trouble getting past that. Probably because I'm still trying to find relevant followers and engage with them. I also do it manually instead of using some tool (which is tempting). Having a lot of followers is great, but having followers that RT and engage is more valuable.
It does not hurt to use something like Wefollow and Twellow to find people in your targeted niche or even interested. I have used those myself to find people that are in my niche that I can learn from too. 🙂
I am very picky about who i follow and who follows me. I dont want my twitter to be filled up with spam, that eludes the point of social media completely.
You are quite right… it defeats the point of social networking. I think the following habit is one was spurred on from the MySpace days.
There is no doubt what you argue about. I have a few hundreds of followers and on the equal numbers I’m following them too. But among these hundreds, there are hardly a few dozens of tweeps who are really conversing and interracting. I believe this depends upon how you engage in twitter. Though few, I have got greatest friends there. They always helped me. Apart from you, Ileane, kannanbala, bloggingJunkie, manisVce, JimiJones shirleyszone are the greatest
I think a lot of people are learning that they really just want to connect, rather than get the extra baggage of having thousands of messages to try to catch up and reply to. I value my closer circle, but I also value those that I engage in conversation with on occasion.
You have 12k followers? Congratulations to you!
And you're right, it's about brand management and finding the right people to network with on Twitter, and that's very, very tricky. There are too many people with too many followers who not only tweet things that have no value, but whose followers only care for things that have no value. In other words: it's pretty easy to find dead-ends on Twitter, or circles that will stay closed.
I'm a firm believer that only a few people are really inspired and dedicated to promoting others' content and helping other voices get heard or just helping out generally. It's so easy to give a link, yet if we look at the number of people who do so online it's a very small percentage. In many ways, I think a truly successful Twitter brand has to come from establishing oneself outside of Twitter, but that's a guess on my part.
My recent post Comment on Cowboy Bebop, “Sympathy for the Devil,” Session 6