Is the number of your followers important to you?

As a follow on to my question about "What are your follow rules?", the next question is;

How important is your number of Twitter followers to your business and why?

I have seen two train of thoughts on this one. The first is to get as many followers as possible so you can broadcast to as many people as possible. The second is to build a quality following i.e. a lower number of followers but followers you can interactive with and stand more chance of converting. I try to follow in to the second option.

By the way there is no reason for these questions other than to start some discussions on Twitter useage

I have different reasons for following.  I follow most people when they follow me, until they either keep posting the same auto tweets every day or try selling to me with a DM the moment I follow.  Then I follow people I am interested in, it is a lot warmer than the old traditional stalking 

Mine is numbers but only because I have people following me, then I follow back in a lot of cases, until they start saying the same things etc...

I have no idea how many followers I have, nor do I really care. Quality over quantity is important - 500 followers who don't care what you're saying, or 50 who do? Which is going to bring in the business?

I think in general Twitter has been overhyped as a method of driving sales (particularly for B2B companies) - don't get me wrong, it can work and having an account can really improve your profile/customer relations, but I'm sceptical of 'social media gurus' who say that you must have $arbitrary_value followers and/or must tweet so many times a day.

Hi Carl,

For our clients, we always recommend gathering quality followers as opposed to a large quantity of uninterested ones.

A targeted followers list encourages ReTweets and Replies. This is important for businesses as it starts the first stages of building a relationship. When you start engaging with people that are genuinely interested in your product or service, you are a lot more likely to convert them into paying customers.

Quality followers all the way - followers that will interact, RT and refer business and contacts your way

There is absoloutly no point in chasing big numbers for vanity. The old adage "quality not quantity" certainly applies!

I genuinely only follow people I'm interested in hearing from and don't do follow backs. If someone is interested in what I have to say great, but that doesn't mean I'll like their posts.

As for the number of followers, it would be nice to have millions but at the end of the day I spout rubbish on Twitter anyway so am glad I don't have more people sometimes.

No it isnt important to me, the quality of people that follow means more, i would rather people followed me because they were interested in us and what we do, rather than follow for the follow back! 

Yes it is important to me. The more followers I have the more likely that the number will include 'quality' followers, the more people visit my website, the more retweets I have etc.

I get all the quality over quantity but it's still nice to see a decent amount of followers on there.

I've reached over 2k now and up until that point was overly interested to see how many I was getting etc. Now i've lost interest a bit but it's still nice to see that there are that many spambots interested in my various ramblings

Exactly^^

If the content you post on Twitter is relevant, engaging and captivation, all your followers will be quality!

Well that's Katie out of the running then.

I started this thread thinking quality of quantity, but there is a lot to be said for the "more followers I have the more chances that includes quality followers" theory

The second option is good, because you don't need a big core following in order to get news out into a large population. Your loyal followers will do that for you.