Mention to a Twitter user that you're on Twitter too and one of the first questions you'll be asked is 'how many followers do you have?'
It's human nature, I suppose.
But lately social media commentators have been asking the question: what would happen if the follower number disappeared from Twitter profiles?
In other words, what if you - and only you - knew just how big (or small) your personal Twitter audience was?
I can think of two possible outcomes straightaway. And both say something interesting about our relationship with social networking sites - as users and as journalists.
Firstly, some of the more obnoxious behaviour to be found on Twitter is caused by users jostling to pump up their all-important follower count - by any means necessary.
Unlike some social networks, Twitter is not ostensibly a game. But humans are competitive.
Kevin Marks recalled on a recent podcast how the Top 100 feature of blog aggregator Technorati - which he helped maintain - became a millstone around his neck:
"We built a leader board for blogging. And I spent lots of time saying: 'Yeah, that's the most boring page on the site - the important part of this site is finding other conversations and connecting to people.' And [the response] was always: 'No, tell me more about how I get further up this curve.'"
Could Twitter flourish without follower numbers?
It's certainly possible. There are social spaces - like photo-sharing site Flickr.com - which don't push numbers so overtly, but nonetheless manage to keep users interested (and interacting respectfully - even more so, some would argue, due to the less competitive environment).
Which brings us on to the second potential outcome. An end to journalists quoting follower numbers as a shorthand for influence.
To drop into one's copy the fact that - for instance - Stephen Fry has 1.4 million Twitter followers, while Ashton Kutcher has 4.7 million, implies something about the two stars' relative popularity and clout.
But that presumes all followers are somehow equal. Not so: much depends on how and why they chose to follow you in the first place.
Until recently, Twitter presented all its new users with a 'selected user list' (or SUL) when they signed up. The SUL allowed Twitter novices to follow a range of pre-chosen people, either individually or in bulk.
Being on the SUL guaranteed its residents enormous audience figures. But were their new, lightly engaged followers likely to really hear what they were saying? Be influenced by it?
Or even use the service more than once, before losing interest and bailing out?
The answer would seem to be no. In a fascinating piece last December, veteran blogger Anil Dash described his surprise on discovering he'd suddenly appeared on Twitter's SUL; then his double surprise on finding that, despite increasing his follower number exponentially ...
"Being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get."
If you're in a cerebral mood you might even want to read the recently released academic paper Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy, which concludes:
"... topological measures such as indegree alone [i.e. number of followers] reveal very little about the influence of a user."
Still want to know - or quote in print - exactly how many followers I have?
