I think the theories I mention here still hold for Twitter though, because it’s not so much about “popularity”, it’s more about “influence”, which isn’t necessarily measured in number of followers.

When someone with 25,000 followers follows me on Twitter, I get intruiged and start looking at who follows them. More often than not, it’s clear that those aren’t quality followers — lots of spambots and random accounts.

But then I look at someone like @jontyfisher, one of my favorites on Twitter — he shares great links. 700+ followers, but he only follows 168 people. Those are people I want to look closely if I should follow them too, because I see Jonty as an influencer on Twitter. (There are more examples of course).

So how does a newbie catch up? I think by (1) first building great content on their Twitter profile, and then (2) meticulously following the influencers in their field. It’s hard work, but the other alternative is to follow 25,000 random people just to get your follower count up. Not much glory in that