Twitter Popularity Starts to Deliver Real Returns

The biggest mistake that people make when they start using Twitter is to look at the numbers. They see the figure under the followers link and they believe that the bigger the number, the more successful the twitterer.

That may be true. But it doesn’t have to be.

True success on Twitter isn’t about how many people are following you. There are some very simple strategies than can boost follower numbers. It’s about the depth of the relationship you manage to build with those followers.

It’s about whether they take part in your discussions, click your links, and act on your invitations. Tweeting builds up the capital that you cash in on when you want your followers to take action. Just as a website with 10,000 users and a 3 percent clickthrough rate will earn more money than a site with 20,000 users and a 1 percent clickthrough rate, so a Twitter timeline with a small following and a deep relationship will deliver more than a timeline with a large but distant following.

Now though, numbers are starting to have a greater influence.

At the beginning of April, Twitter introduced a new algorithm into its search engine. Enter a search term into the search box on the site or on search.twitter.com and you might get some sponsored tweets. But you might also see some “top tweets.”

These are the most popular tweets for the keyword phrase you entered, measured by the number of times they’ve been retweeted.

That opens up a whole new world of opportunities. Now popularity really will count. The more you tweet about a topic in your field and the more those tweets are seen by large numbers of people, the greater the chances that you’ll receive retweets. Those retweets will get you seen by people in those followers’ timelines.

But now they’ll also move you to the top of the search results.

That may be a pretty powerful reward for building a large audience and creating the kind of content that your followers want to share.

But Twitter isn’t a search engine. Twitter’s users look for discussions and people to follow. They don’t look for information in the way that they do on Google or Bing. And if Top Tweets really do start to deliver results, it will be interesting to see how Twitter acts to prevent abuse.

For now though, new users who mistake numbers for success might well find that they’re onto something. Big numbers could well lead to even bigger numbers — and that means more people to build a relationship with.