Hype

No One Has 1M Twitter Followers

Twitter follower counts inflated, one enthusiast says.

Kim Kardashian has 2.7 million people following her tweets, and is paid $10,000 for each tweeted product endorsement. But are those companies getting their money’s worth? Anil Dash has been analyzing what it’s like to get his feed featured on Twitter’s suggested user list. So far it’s bumped his number of followers from 18,000 to 300,000. Sounds great, right? But Dash still gets the same number of replies and retweets as he did with fewer fans, and he argues that “inflated” follower numbers are meaningless. Being on the list did nothing for Creative Commons, NBC’s Today show, or Starbucks. Many others privately said they had the same results, but would not comment on the record. “Today's celebrity reporting often includes a mention of a celeb's follower count as a matter of course. But I'm hoping to encourage some skepticism,” Dash writes.