Followers are the new page views
We tend to pay attention to the wrong numbers. I remember when I was young counting my Christmas presents as a way to somehow place value on the day’s haul. Completely out of touch? Yes, but when you’re six you don’t know much better. As time goes on you realize the number of presents doesn’t matter at all, or presents whatsoever. Eventually it’s plainly obvious what the whole thing should be about. It just takes decades of growing up to figure it out.
The same happens with new systems and technologies and we are going through that with Twitter at the moment. Especially at big companies where there is a corporate Twitter account, there is a strange focus on “getting your followers up.” Why? No idea, really. Your followers could be all be drones, but if you had 1,000,000 of them, somebody would think you were important. Ten years ago a similar discussion focused around page views. Both are indicative of large numbers, but neither one has any actionable value (page views have at least an advertisement attached to each one, however marginally small that value is — less than one penny to around a few cents at the max end). Directionally correct to show growth, maybe, but nothing more.
Followers, like a lot of things we measure for sport, don’t matter. We just haven’t grown up enough to realize it.
