Cult followers: the Twitter numbers game

No one likes a kiss-ass. Mostly because it works.

Like other places in life, Twitter is full of kiss-asses. There’s always someone begging for new followers or praying that their favorite popstar smiles down and retweets confirmation of their puny mortal existence.

For the most part, it’s all a numbers game. Modern life on the web is built on an endless rush for attention, which can be measured directly by the numbers floating below profile pictures. We gotta have more likes. More followers. More shares and comments and up-votes. Left unchecked, it’s an addiction that can kill social media platforms — it fills them with hollow users groveling for stats.

Everyone wants to be liked, but very few show the patience to let that happen naturally. It’s too easy to take shortcuts on the internet.

Case in point: buying Twitter followers. For only $1300 you too can join the upper echelons of Twitter users to amass 500,000 followers (many of which aren’t even human), and you don’t even have to be interesting to get there. It’s like a virtual boob job.

But before you buy your way to instant fame, consider for a moment that this is NOT how likeable people do things in real life. If you truly have interesting things to say and share, the followers will come. And they won’t be just numbers — they’ll be actual humans with real reactions and emotions.

Engage with people on Twitter like you engage with people in real life, with common sense. Don’t be an insincere suck-up. Those kinds of accounts are easy to spot and their phoniness is almost tangible. Instead, forget the numbers. Focus on your content, not your count. Say and share cool things. Be a compelling human and pretty soon you’ll find that (surprise) others might think you deserve a little credit.

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