UPDATE: 3 September 2011 we passed 11,000 some time ago and are now nudging towards 12,000. Earlier this week, Twittercounter suggested it would take 8844 days to reach 100,000 followers. Today, it’s halved that estimate, still several years to got before we reach a tenth of the follower count of the likes of Stephen Fry!

UPDATE: 7 July 2011 2 tweeps short of 11,000 as of time of writing

UPDATE: 9 June 2011 One year one, my count passed 10,000 a few weeks ago (25th March) and is fast approaching 11,000. As of the time of writing and with current growth rate that should occur in 18 days. Puts me at about 37,000th out of all twitter users ordered by count alone. I’ve posted almost 9000 times since I joined Twitter in June 2007. All of which is totally meaningless and irrelevant to everyone else, isn’t it?

Is it wrong to mention your Twitter count? A week or so ago, my @sciencebase twitter account was slowly edging towards 7000 followers, as of this weekend, it passed that number, which is nice.

Of course, I’m pretty sure there will be many among that number who are not following me because they want to engage, but because they’re hoping to gain some kind of marketing advantage (they’re spammers, SEO gurus, affiliate experts and the like). I’m also pretty sure that most of them follow me because for a moment, however fleeting, they actually wanted to read what I have to say, or at least argue that I’m wrong.

So, first, thank you to all my genuine followers and apologies if I don’t immediately follow you back when you join. Even with lists, searches, and filters it would be very hard to keep on top of the streams from such numbers of people, and it’s not like my count is even a fraction of the size of Stephen Fry’s, say.

When my count stood at 6982 or thereabouts, I mentioned (in a tweet) that although the number is probably quite meaningless in various ways, I was also looking forward to reaching the 7000 landmark. Why wouldn’t I? Well, one erstwhile follower took deep offence at what he saw as me simply marketing myself and grasping at new followers and within hours of my tweet unfollowed me and told me so.

His very high following to follower ratio was rather suspicious, so I suspect he’s just some curmudgeon and I’m quite happy not to have followers like that. The natural progression of a twitter account is for followers to accumulate, gradually, organically, I certainly wasn’t in any way desperate to gather another 18 followers, just curious to see who would join as my count approached 7000.

There are, of course, lots of ways to artificially inflate your twitter count, they’re all pointless if you’re using twitter for the genuine purpose of engagement with your fellow members. I suppose that for someone hoping simply to market themselves or their company adding more and more followers makes the account look more significant, and they might go for those techniques, but if all you’re doing is selling, you are not going to get anywhere useful shouting at artificial followers.

A quote from Mark Schaefer on the blog “Grow” suggests that those of us building genuine follower numbers should be proud of the achievement:

If you’ve built your meaningful and relevant audience carefully, why wouldn’t bigger be better? Why not learn more, make more friends, build more connections?

I must say, I have to agree. For years, almost every blog on the block had a Feedburner count display button and no one seemed to complain about that, so what’s the difference with mentioning one’s twitter count? We all want more followers on social media sites, otherwise, what’s the point? Chris Brogan says something similar. If mentioning that number gives added credence to your feed and attracts potential new followers because they see the crowd gathering, so be it. But, that wasn’t my intention anyway, Just thought it worth 140 characters (out of the millions I type) to mention the fact.

When Twitter temporarily reset everyone’s count to zero, that became almost the only topic of conversation for hours…seems people really do care about their twitter count. If my unfollower didn’t why would he have responded so?