Many years ago, back when MySpace was the king of social networks and Facebook was just starting to make some noise, many people on MySpace would go around adding anyone and everyone as friends on their accounts so that they could brag about having “1,000 friends”.  Somehow this was supposed to make you cool, despite the absurdity of the notion that anyone actually has 1,000+ friends, or that after adding that many people to your profile it would become nearly impossible to search through your friends list to find the people who actually *were* your friends.

Now fast forward to 2009, and I’m having an eerie sense of deja vu in the form of Twitter.  Suddenly, for many people, it seems that the number of followers they have on Twitter is a measure of their self-esteem.  We have new tools available like SocialToo that enable us to automatically follow anyone who follows us, because god forbid they unfollow us (probably using SocialToo to auto-unfollow) for not following them back fast enough and our precious number of followers should fall.  Many may argue from either a personal or business standpoint that they need 20,000 followers because they want to be able to market/reach out to a broad audience…but really – if I’m @SwimmingProductsSuperstore I don’t think having followers like @IHateWater and @CantSwim is going to help me grow a targeted audience.

As an interesting experiment, for a short period of time I sent out tweets with nothing but nonsense and “buzz words”.  For example, I might have tweeted something like this:

@johnbixby: #SEM #SEO #marketing make money twitter grow followers fast product management tech seo sem online web design

And you know what happened?  I got more followers more rapidly during that time period than any other.  But what good is trying to build a following that way going to do me?  Probably none.  Because instead of picking up thoughtful and active followers through interaction on Twitter, I’ve picked up a bunch of followers set on auto-pilot who are probably just looking to spam people with products or services related to those keywords.

If you really want Twitter to be valuable for either yourself or your business, it’s much more productive to avoid the pitfalls of the “more followers legitimizes my existence” mindset and really work on building a following of thoughtful and active twitterers who share your interests.  If you’re a recovering followeraholic, I’d strongly urge you to spend some time “trimming the fat” from your list so that your timeline is full of more useful and relevant tweets from quality users as opposed to being clogged up with random garbage.  If you use Tweetdeck or Seesmic you may be able to survive this way, but the web is still the dominant Twitter interface out there and following these tips will make your life a much more pleasant one.