http://twitter-fail.com/2010/02/20/the-secret-to-fewer-followers/

I used twitter karma and found out that about 20% of my followers are inactive (defined as no activity for over 100 days). It was a bit less than this for the people I was following.

I decided to do some pruning. I blocked/unblocked these people. This forces them to unfollow me (they are welcome to refollow if they rejoin and miss me). I’ve started added the people I was following, that I am giving the boot, to a “dead accounts” list. If they come back I can follow again.

But that 20% if for someone like me. I actively vet my followers. I’ve blocked nearly 7,000 people so far. Take some of these celebrity types who get tons of followers. I bet their inactive accounts are even higher.

Anyway, this is a long way to say that I think the quality of the people I follow (and that follow me) are higher than most. I have less than 4,000 followers but if I post a link bit.ly says 40 people (on average) follow it.

I have no idea if that’s good or not. I might have higher higher response with more followers, but honestly, if I didn’t want you follow I probably don’t care if you check out my links.

The numbers are all wrong. I would be willing to bet I could get 100k followers in 100 days, doing all the clicks by hand, but you’d have to be willing to pay me 100k to prove it. Follower counts mean little. It’s the interaction that matters.

I would like to point out though, that although there’s no such thing as influence metrics, there can be influential people who tweet.

That doesn’t mean they are influential because they tweet, just like the President of the U.S. isn’t influential because he uses a phone.