As Easy As One, Two, Bree

Taking a quick glance down the Top 100 Followed List on Twitter it’s just your typical who’s who of celebrities, tv shows, corporations and random Internet stars. Nothing too out of the ordinary. But then, I stumbled across this brand new site TwitTruth which breaks down Twitter subscriber numbers even more.

TwitTruth shows a table of various engagement statistics including the account holders Reply rate, Direct Reply rate and, my favorite, % of Tweets that engage a user.

Now, all of a sudden that Top 100 List is starting to look VERY different and light gets shed on the “real” engagers of the site. Here are a few examples:

Diddy (iamdiddy):

- 935,000+ followers
- 1/412 chance of diddy responding to a direct message (eh, doesnt sound great)
- 2.5% of tweets engage a user (wow, bad).

When you have that many subscribers, every single message should engage SOMOENE.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable:

- 661,000+ followers
- 1/667 chance of Pete responding to a direct message
- 1% of tweets engage a user (isn’t he supposed to be the social media guru? This one didn’t surprise me, because his Twitter updates got so annoying to me, I turned it off for myself. They really are just updates that the blog is updated, but you think people would comment about the post he is promoting or something.)

Samantha Ronson:

- 324,000+ followers
- 1/14 chance of Samantha responding to a direct message (great odds!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (now THERE is a number that you want to see).

Starbucks Coffee:

- 183,000+ followers
- 1/5 chance of Starbucks responding to a direct message (go praise that latte!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (love the corporate social media responsibility!)

There’s just a snapshot to give you a taste, but you can see for yourself at TwitTruth.com.

So, what do you take from all this?

If you are going to spend all that time building a gigantic list of people, you better make sure that they are actually paying attention to you. 1 million subscribers? Who cares? Are they listening to you?

It’s the worst thing in the world, to have a subscriber base that large, but you can’t sell your product or do anything with it.

Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 5,000 ultra engaged people who pay attention and act on your messages? Or a list of 50,000 with only 1% listening to you? Do the math, that’s only 500 people. Pay attention to the bigger picture of what those follower numbers mean.

Go ahead, go look yourself up on TwitTruth too. I won’t look until you tell me to ;)