Can we bitch slap this ego pimping of Twitter ‘numbers’ into oblivion – Please!

This morning when I was reading through my feeds I came across an excellent post by Amber Naslund where she makes some great points about bloggers going nuts over numbers. Her point was that in the end the numbers don’t mean squat it is the people; whether it is a 100 or a 100,000 that are what we should be jumping for joy over. there is just so much that she wrote that is so important and which a lot of bloggers seem to forget. There is so much I could end up quoting her whole post so I’ll just give you this snippet (then do yourself a favour and go read the rest of it)

Someone’s bound to yell at me for this. But I simply don’t care about my blog’s traffic. Why? That’s just a number.

Here’s what I do care about.

I care that when you come here, you find something that’s valuable. To you. Either you enjoyed reading it, or it gave you an idea, or you showed it to your boss, or it just reassured you that you’re not the only crazy one thinking these things.

I care that my blog encourages you to connect with me other places. Not just Facebook or Twitter, but on the phone. Email. Over coffee. And hopefully, when we meet in person, we feel like we know each other a little bit.

She is so right in saying it is the people that make social media what it is. It sure isn’t about numbers but you would never know that by the constant yammering on Twitter about numbers. Whether it is how many people are following some person or how some bullshit milestone of tweets has been reached. Does anyone really give a shit about this crap?

The number of times that you babbled something in a 140 characters doesn’t matter folks – really it doesn’t. Do you really think that the people following you give a toss about the fact that you have crossed some inane line in the number of tweets you have sent out? I sincerely doubt it. Do you really think that anyone actually cares one iota how many people are following you? Come on give us a break for crying out loud – get a grip.

The reality is that at some point it doesn’t matter how many people you have following you or how many tweets you have twitted the numbers won’t mean anything. The only thing that broadcasting that kind of nonsense does is pump up your own ego and show you care more about the numbers than the people. These are the people who probably followed you in the first place because they thought you might value their input or comments or ideas.

So enough already with the number pimping because truthfully you are probably going to drive away your current followers and scare off any future ones you might get because they’ll think you are only interested in the numbers – not them and what they bring to the table. Beside bragging about something so unimportant really isn’t doing anything for your character.