A friend of mine sent a tweet to Dave Trott on the number of people he follows via Twitter.
He said he couldn’t believe Trott followed 30 people.
Dave Trott replied with a joke. A good one.
He said that he agreed. And that he’d cut that number down to 20.
Boom-tish.
Advertising copy live as it happens.
What my friend actually meant was that the number was far too low and that Dave Trott should think about following more. My friend suggested that he would get more from the experience of Twitter that way.
Dave Trott responded with a link to Seth Godin’s blog piece about Dunbar’s Number.
Dunbar’s number is 150. Dunbar estimates that any person can only have 150 friends.
It’s down to tribes and the way mankind interacts.
It sounds true.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because when it comes to social networking, Dunbar’s number doesn’t apply.
Because the dirty secret truth about social networking is that we aren’t friends. Not really. Not in the tribal sense.
And why would an ad-man like Dave Trott want that?
When he promotes himself using Twitter he doesn’t want a tribal relationship with his followers.
He doesn’t limit their numbers to 150.
And I’m willing to bet he doesn’t want his ideas, his tweets, to be read by just 150 people.
He doesn’t want a tribal relationship with those people.
He may like the idea of his tweets being picked up and retweeted.
He may like the idea of sending his people out to carry the torch.
But advertising doesn’t work like that.
You don’t broadcast an ad to 150 people and believe that their word, their tribal strength is stronger that way.
Word of mouth is great.
But why limit it?
There is no guarantee that if only 150 people hear your ad, that their takeup and evangelism will be any stronger
Facebook might call us friends. Twitter might call us followers.
But they are just being polite.
When we read a tweet we are just dipping into the thoughts of a number of people. Any number of people.
Some of those thoughts will stick. Some won’t.
We’ll pay more attention to the former and less to the latter.
But we aren’t trying to be their friends. Not in the real, social sense. It’s nice when it happens but it’s not the primary concern. On Twitter I want to be exposed to lots of ideas. I select a list of people to follow based on the hope that their ideas will be good. And I’d want to be in a similar camp for other people. Building trust on as wide a scale as possible.
I’ll do my best to make my tweets stand out in the way I would if I were writing an ad.
But I’m under no illusions as to why others follow me.
It’s social networking. Not social friendships.
