100 Twitter Followers Is All You Need

With Twitter, the number of followers you have is often a reflection of your success. We’ve seen big numbers recently on political figures, olympic competitors, and countless others. Even Big Bird made his mark in the numbers game with one simple word to start off his own Twitter account: “Tweet?” Simple, brilliant and effective.

The number of followers on your Twitter account is a good indication of your company’s popularity and reach, but do you really need to have thousands of followers to be successful? Very often, the answer is no … all you need is a small amount of true followers.

What is a True Follower?

Look, we get it. You’re proud of every follower, friend, like, etc. that your business receives within the social media realm. But it’s important that you face facts … just like you yourself have done with certain brands that you enjoy, people will often add a brand to his or her Twitter account and then not pay a lot of attention to it later on. Sure, they may see your Tweets, but they’re not true followers. They’re too passive to receive that label. They’re not exactly fair weather friends, but it’s a close approximation.

So what is a true follower? That would be a person who — drum roll, please — truly follows your tweets. He (or she) will take a look at every link and article that you post. If you ask him (or her) to retweet your message, it shall be done without question. Heck, he’ll even reply to your tweets and, if possible, engage you in conversation. And he’ll also up-vote your articles on other sites whenever possible. Sure, there may be times when he’ll fumble the ball a little, but for the most part, he is loyal to the end and will promote you in ways that even you are unable to do.

So … How Many True Twitter Followers Do You Really Need?

We should first be upfront about one thing — this is not an exact science. What we do know, however, is that according to some resources, only 1% of your total number of followers will click on a link that you tweet. Use this percentage across the board (retweeting, reading posted articles, and the other elements from above) and that number is beyond dismal … it’s downright scary. But what’s more frightening is that as your number of followers increases, the percentage of “clickers” falls even further.

As we said, this is not an exact science, but you really only need 100 true followers, give or take, for success. This is because a true Twitter follower is like Sam Beckett (the guy from Quantum Leap, not the poet) — he (or she) will touch others and those will touch others, which means that your exposure begins with only 100 but expands exponentially. Don’t believe us? Just take a look at Mari Smith, who brands herself as a “social media thought leader.” She has hundreds of thousands of followers, but some of the links she posts only receive around 130 clicks. That clearly shows that the number of followers isn’t truly indicative of your business’ success or overall reach.