TL;DR Follower counts are overrated. Lots of influential Twitter users have a few thousand or even a few hundred followers.

A few years ago, I’d see Twitter users with 100,000+ followers and think, “Wow! They must be famous!”

And then I realized that for some users, things didn’t add up.

I’d find the occasional user who followed 101,999 users, had 101,000 followers, and tweeted. Once.

I discovered tools like TwitterAudit, which estimates the percentage of a user’s followers that are fake. From the TwitterAudit website:

“Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake.”

And then The New York Times published an expose on the black market for fake followers titled “The Follower Factory.” 👈 Definitely worth a read.

The Rise of the Micro-Twinfluencers

In short: large follower counts no longer impress me.

Instead, I’m impressed by those who consistently drive action and engagement from their tweets. They’ll share a captivating photo or an interesting observation and receive a stream of likes, retweets and comments.

I’m looking at a few of these users right now, and their follower counts are: 2,174, 2,345 and 2,878. I’m going to coin a term for these folks: the micro-twinfluencers.

Let’s take a look at why micro-twinfluencers hold more sway than others with 100,000+ followers.

Inbound vs. Outbound

The likelihood of someone engaging with your tweets has a lot to do with how they came to follow you.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s important. 😜

The likelihood of someone engaging with your tweets has a lot to do with how they came to follow you.

Inbound: A lot like inbound marketing, someone discovered you and decided to follow you. They could have seen your tweet via search, saw your account mentioned by someone else, or searched specifically for your profile from an article they read or an offline mention of your name. The follow was initiated by the user, based on an implied interest in your tweets.

Outbound:In an effort to increase your count, you target a bunch of users, either via software or manually, that you’d like to become followers of you. Let’s say you’re a marketer, so you do a search of users with the word “marketing” in their profile. You follow 50+ users and hope that some follow you back.

In both scenarios, you’ve gained followers. But let’s take a closer look:

Inbound: They sought you out. Unless they’re engaging in an outbound method of their own, chances are they’re interested in what you have to say. In addition, it’s likely that your tweets have an affinity to their interests.

Outbound: They followed you because you followed them first. Their interest in what you have to say is hard to quantify.

A good analogy here is an email list and resulting email metrics, such as open rate, click-to-open, etc. With inbound, people discovered your list (e.g. newsletter) and subscribed. With outbound, you purchased a list or started emailing people who didn’t necessarily expect to hear from you.

Takeaway: Micro-twinfluencers don’t engage in outbound tactics. Instead, they attract a following via inbound, which is a more-likely-to-engage set of people, because they consciously opted in with the follow.

Authority

Let’s say you wrote a book on your area of expertise and it was well-received. Within your industry, people bought and read your book. Even if they didn’t, they know you and they know of the book’s existence.

The book is a manifestation of your authority: you have a body of knowledge that’s well-regarded and sought-after.

Authority goes beyond the book. It extends to the tweets you share and the conferences you speak at. If a company wants to educate their employees, they’ll invite you to come speak to them. If a reporter is writing an article about your industry, they’ll want quotes from you.

As a result of your authority, you can move a meaningful percentage of your 2,000+ followers to action. Everyone else can see that by browsing your profile and noticing the engagement on your tweets. It’s more engagement that some users with 100,000+ followers, even if your following is 98% smaller.

A Unique POV (Point of View)

One thing I’ve noticed about micro-twinfluencers: they share opinions, perspectives and experiences more than they share links.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s important. 😜

Micro-twinfluencers share opinions, perspectives and experiences more than they share links.

Sharing a title, link and hashtag on Twitter has become a commodity. It’s a common use case and provides little differentiation among the thousands of tweets in the feed.

Having said that, twinfluencers do share links 🙄

But they do it differently. They’ll use the available 280 characters to include the following:

• Their opinion of the article
• Why they agree or disagree with the author
• Their perspective on why YOU ought to read it
• The impact the article made on them
• Their takeaways

This raises the prominence of the tweet and, combined with the micro-twinfluencers’ authority, drives people to take action: likes, retweets, comments and, most importantly, clicking to read the article.

When they’re not sharing links, micro-twinfluencers:

• Share experiences they had with a web application or a store clerk
• Share photos from their travels, pointing out landmarks or other points of interest
• Share updates on what they’re working on, in a non-promotional way
• Share opinions about a current event

What’s the takeaway here?

That the sum total of micro-twinfluencers’ experiences, opinions and perspectives is 100% unique to them.

That uniqueness helps them stand out in the crowd, garnering attention and influence.

Attract Active Users

This final point is the most important, so I saved it for last:

At any point in the day, whether it’s midnight 🕛 or noon 🕛, chances are your followers are NOT ON TWITTER.

When people are not on Twitter, they won’t see what you just tweeted. You hope your tweets are “good enough” that when users do login, the Twitter algorithm places your tweets near the top of the feed or features them in the “In case you missed it” section.

Micro-twinfluencers, with their inbound following, authority and unique POV, have their tweets favored by the algorithm more often than not.

While I don’t have data to back this up, I believe that users with an organic following (via inbound) have a higher concentration of active users who consistently use Twitter.

Micro-twinfluencers benefit from an engaged audience who check Twitter consistently.

Consider the user with 100,000 followers, some of whom were purchased. Chances are that right this moment, 99,940 of those followers are offline and not able to engage on Twitter!

To drive engagement on Twitter, it’s essential to attract active users who consistently check Twitter.

If you’re a micro-twinfluencer around social media marketing, that’s good, because you have an affinity to users who check social media often.

NOTE: While this post focused on followers, there are other ways to drive action and influence from your tweets (e.g. being found via search, retweets, mentions in mainstream media, etc.). Perhaps I’ll cover that in another post.