Number of followers will mean less and less

Here’s why:

• It is human nature to want to progress. In the realm of social networking, it can either mean more interactions with your friends/followers or increase the number of people you connect with. Most of the time it’s both, because:
• There is pressure to follow back. People follow you and you feel you have to follow back. It’s peer pressure. Even if you don’t give in to this pressure, you are at least exposed to more people (you get notified when you have new followers) and chances are you’ll follow at least some of them.
• Now suddenly you find yourself following a lot of people. But there is a limit to the human attention span and your available time, so you only focus on a select few — your favorites or close friends. There are plenty of tools that let you do this and they are getting more sophisticated. Facebook and Friendfeed have lists. Twitter tools such as TweetDeck and Seesmic have groups.
• At the end, even though you may follow thousands of people, you’ll only be focusing on a select few and “fake follow” the rest. For your non-favorite friends, instead of treating their posts/tweets like emails that have to be read, you’ll treat them like “river of news” in which you dip in and out when you have the time.

The points above will happen to most people. Your followers will be following hundreds or thousands of people and your competition for their eyeballs will become tougher. Instead of tracking your number of followers, you should be asking whether you get to be on their favorite list. Rather than having ten thousand followers, it may be better to be followed by one Ashton Kutcher (2,9 million Twitter followers as of this blog post) and having Ashton read and retweet everything that you post.

Final note: I hope when more people realize this, they’ll focus on being interesting, rather than  trying to get more followers. Also, for the record, I neither spend the effort to become interesting nor spend the time to get more followers.