A year or two back it was pointed out to me that one cultural commentator believes me to be one of the five or six people who actually control the entire Anglophone media. If only. One reason given for my evidently godlike control over hearts and minds is my Twitter “Follower” count. Which is a ridiculous metric for influence. I was an earlyish Twitter user. I have some 530K “followers,” but Twitter is bad at clearing out dormant accounts and spam accounts. Between that, different usage patterns, timezones and timeline churn, I’d have to work really hard to reach fifty thousand live humans from that five hundred thousand. The follower count is a meaningless number. Engagement is the other metric — not even how many people click on a link, but what kind of conversation is happening, and with who. Here’s a great example of actual understanding: Medium measures not hits and clicks, but how many people read to the end of a Medium post.

So if you only have three hundred followers on Twitter but you get to talk with them all the time and you share your tastes and you follow up on each others’ recommendations? You have more actual influence on the shape of the world than some crappy fast food brand with a million followers.

 

(Adapted from the most recent edition of my newsletter, ORBITAL OPERATIONS, which you can subscribe to by going here and putting your name and email address in the holes.)