Avvocating: The Disconnect Between Twitter Followers and Influence

By Mark S. Britton
Special to the Legal Technology Blog

Regular readers of Avvocating or the Avvo Blog know that I am constantly counseling lawyer marketers to "Preserve the Core." In our different Avvo Tours, I hear how different lawyers use the Internet and think about their Core. Not surprisingly, Twitter comes up over and over as a tool for supporting the Core -- partly due to my speech (I highly recommend Twitter as such a tool) and partly because Twitter-mania is still raging like a Category 5 hurricane.

I love Twitter -- everyone knows that. But it's worth calling out a fallacy that is helping serve as a cornerstone of the mania. The fallacy is that the number of Twitter followers one has is positively, if not perfectly, correlated to the amount of influence someone has in the marketplace. In this regard, I have heard many self-proclaimed, social media "mavens" shout, "Listen to what I have to say because *I* have thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of Twitter followers." The implication is that they are as influential as Bill Gates, Socrates or Ghandi. Another potential implication is that you should pay them $500 per hour for their consulting services.

I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but the number of one's Twitter followers has nothing to do with his or her influence. In other words, 9.9 times out of ten, the heavily Twitter-followed have as much influence as this guy. You don’t know him, do you? And, that's the point. This guy could go on Twitter tomorrow and start following 100,000 people. Within a couple of months, he would have tens of thousands of followers, simply because the people he originally followed are flattered to be followed and follow him back. There are also loads of people out there who are trying to build up their Twitter followers and, with differing degrees of blatancy, will simply follow our guy because he followed them. So here is the true Twitter litmus test on the influence front: Look at the ratio of the number of people someone is "following" vs. their "followers" (i.e., divide their "following" number by their "follower" number). The closer that ratio is to 0 (e.g., 125 "following" divided by 40,000 "followers"), the more influential that person is. And, conversely, the closer that ratio is to 1 (e.g., 34,956 "following" divided by 40,000 "followers"), and especially if it exceeds 1 (e.g., 42,566 "following" divided by 40,000 "followers"), the *less* influential that person probably is. Rather than being a thought leader, maven or ninja, they are regular people just like you and me -- they just work harder at spamming Twitter for followers than you or me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, to start in Twitter, you will start following people and they will follow you. That is the beautiful social and professional networking essence of Twitter. It is all a question of when your Twitter followers start speaking for your influence -- and the realistic answer is "not very often." Now, some will counter with, "I may not be influential, but my followers give me a marketing platform of tens of thousands of people." And, I agree with this to some extent. But the problem is that, after a couple hundred followers, it is impossible for anyone to stay on top of the thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of tweets their followers generate daily. Using different Twitter tools, people will keep a close eye on the Tweets of their favorites, and everything else is just noise. You might be one of those that is a favorite of everyone, but again that is the exception rather than the rule.

"Heresy," some will cry. They might even accuse me of not really loving Twitter. But, I do -- I really do. I just struggle with those who are using it for vanity’s sake, rather than using as originally intended – as an Internet-based platform to make meaningful personal and professional connections. To put this into [comic] relief, let me offer an offline, hypothetical conversation between, let's say, Lucy and Charlie Brown.

Lucy: I went to a party last night with 65,000 people … I’m sooooo influential.

Charlie Brown: Really, who did you talk to?

Lucy: I don’t know, I just talked and talked.

Charlie Brown: Was anyone listening?

Lucy: Of course they were! Didn’t I just tell you there were 65,000 people!

Mark Britton is the founder and CEO of Avvo. He is a 17-year lawyer with deep experience in the legal and e-commerce industries. Mark is the former general counsel of Expedia.com and has worked as an attorney in large, medium and small law firms. In 2007, Mark was named one of Seattle’s “Top 25 Innovators” by Seattle Business Monthly Magazine. He is also a frequent commentator on financial, legal and other business issues, regularly appearing on programs such as ABC’s "Good Morning America," Fox Business’ “America’s Nightly Scoreboard,” CNN "Money," and Dow Jones "MarketWatch."

Comments

[Aaron]

Good point except twitter following/followers ratios can be manipulated as well.

There are tools out there that auto-follow thousands of people, and after they are followed back, unfollow them say a couple of days later to get a excellent follower/following ratio.

Personally I think influence should be quantified as well by the type of follower one has.

As you point out a "serial follower" who follows thousands of people are worth far less than one who follows only a small number before the later is far likely to be seeing your tweets and hence more likely to be influenced.

I'm always honoured when I'm followed by someone who I don't know in real life, and he has a small follower count (say <100) and clearly isn't in the habit of following every Tom, Dick and Harry.

It's trival to come up with some formula that takes into account not just the number of followers you have (or the ratio), but also the number of people your followers are following.

But it's very difficult to interpret a metric that takes this into account.

[John]

that's a dumb way to tell how much influence a person may or may not have - some influential people happen to auto follow back, which renders your entire theory invalid - the best way to measure influence is through RT's...

[Mark Britton]

Aaron – What you are avvocating :-) is very similar to the Google link + link authority concept. I agree that such an overlay would be even more precise. There are actually all sorts of things that you could add to this to make it more precise – even retweets as John suggests.

The problem with retweets is that you would have to follow the Aaron/Google approach of calculating the breadth and authority of the retweeters. Having a wide-range of people, especially influential people, retweet your thoughts surely adds to the influence argument. However, having everyone in your firm retweet everything you say does not equal influence, even though it increases the absolute number of retweets.

Finally, even though you, John, focus on the retweet variable. I can assure you that, when you talk about your Twitter participation, you do not say “I’m retweeted by 27 people a day!” You speak to your followers because, again, most people equate the absolute number of followers with absolute influence.

Mark

[Dave Van de Walle]

Good dialogue -- but let me share a couple things:

1 - the Following 2000 limit means that the guy in the picture can't get to 10,000 followers tomorrow, unless he's Oprah. Even big names have launched and said "we're on Twitter" and then ended up with 10,000 after a month or so. It takes time but remember that you're not allowed to follow more than 110% of the number that's following you.

2 - Try http://grader.com to measure Twitter reach.

3 - Have a conversation. Or two. Or twenty. People like that.