[silverbax88]

Twitter followers are just about worthless from a business perspective unless it's a staggering number (in my experience). You get a LOT more direct response from a Linked In group of 4,000 active members than a Twitter account with 100,000 followers.

[jonnathanson]

A lot of that has to do with the way Twitter works. Following someone on Twitter is as simple as clicking "Follow" and forgetting about it. No social considerations to weigh, no social qualification (Do I actually know this person? Does he know me?), and no site qualification (Am I a real person? A bot? A highly connected person? A low-connected person?).

Joining a LinkedIn group asks a lot more of a user. There are multiple stages of pre-qualification, both user-initiated (seeking out and joining the group) and group-initiated (a lot of groups screen new members, for instance, screening "Stanford Alumni" for a Stanford email address of some sort). Your typical LinkedIn group membership is a lot smaller than a Twitter followership, but it's more homogeneously centered around a specific dimension of mutual interest, and the leads are more higly qualified.

Twitter can work, and quite well, but it's a painstaking process. Cultivating a qualified and influential Twitter following is tantamount to having a second full-time job. There are followerships of 100,000+ that have basically been hand-picked and nurtured. Those are the kind of followerships that actually work. If you have even 10,000 fans that hang onto your every word, and a decent portion of which have others who do the same for them, then your following is worth an order of magnitude more than a 100,000+ following of mostly bots and dead weight.

Getting to 1M+ followers on Twitter, based purely on buying or attracting bots or mutual follow/follow arrangements, is a nontrivial challenge and a serious waate of time and money. Not many people do it. This is why the sort of people who have 1M+ followers usually have a decent chunk of qualified followers, as well. These people tend to be famous outside of Twitter. I would be floored by any small business that managed to get into the hundreds of thousands of followers, let alone millions, with a strong percentage of qualified, active followers. It's pretty easy to suss out the difference, too.

[poopsintub]

The more followers you have the worse your click-through rate becomes. Twitter is horrendous for trying to get people to actually go to your content or advertised tweets because no one is constantly signed into twitter unless you're doing it for business or you're a teen.

[jt884]

How much are you getting paid for astroturfing?