I would guess that a large number of posts by testers (or geeks in general) about Twitter and Quality tear a strip out of them for their dubious availability and the now infamous Fail Whale. This is not most posts though.

Twitter is rapidly becoming a medium of choice of marketing. It’s cheap (free), has a low technological barrier to entry and has a wide (and ever widening) audience. I, like a number of people I know, have very broad mandates about where we are supposed to stick our noses. I’m not the Manager of Specific Product Quality, or even Manager of Software Quality. I need to worry about everything the company does and the image it projects in the marketplace. That is my preferred method of operation but also means that the Tweets from the corporate account also fall under the umbrella.

What concerns me about corporate use of Twitter is the complete fixation on the number of Followers the account has.

Bigger is better! Just look at the race between Mr. Demi Moore and CNN to a million followers earlier this month. But c’mon, is bigger really better? If you are a spam-bot, then absolutely; in a corporate account setting the answer is clearly no. We want Quality over Quantity.

I think mandatory reading for all corporate Twitter holders should be the 1000 True Fans essay. The main thrust of the article is the following:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

For the remainder of this post when you see ‘fan’ swap in ‘follower’.

True fans are the ones you want to nurture as they are the ones that are most likely to use your service or purchase your good.

Twitter has joined the rest of the internet and is full of spam, hucksters and auto-follow bots which will inflate your Follower count without you doing anything. These are not real fans, and certainly not true fans.

Fans you acquire from giveaways (‘Follow me by May 3rd and be entered in a draw’) are not true fans, likely not even fans and could be anti-fans if they don’t win or is a hint of impropriety in your contest.

Schemes which offer followers through a simple program are preying on the weak and narrow minded. I saw ‘new FREE tool to massively increase the number of Twitter followers you have!‘ today for instance. They might as well be selling email lists.

How do you get more followers? Perhaps not surprisingly, the process is very similar to normal SEO; participate in the conversation through appropriate and topical replies and re-tweets and generally provide compelling content. People will follow you and they have a much greater chance of being true fans.

You will also have high quality followers, if perhaps less in quantity than someone with thousands of people trying to sell you the newest natural ‘enhancement’ or swampland in Florida.