One thing that everybody seemed to be obsessed with 6 months ago was the amount of followers people had on twitter and people were using every trick in the book to increase their numbers. News comes today that Twitter is starting to clamp down on the number of spam followers and you will probably have noticed a massive reduction in your follower numbers as Twitter starts to get rid of some of the spammers and bots.

This is what Twitter had to say on their blog today..

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

The truth is that hopefully people have forgotten about the numbers game and the madness of the time around when Ashton and CNN were racing for a million followers. Using social media successfully is about engaging the followers you have and talking to your customers rather than having a huge race for followers who are a mixture of spammers, bots and people who filter you out anyway and don’t listen to a thing you say.

One solution that has been touted around in the past is to remove the amount of followers you have altogether from profiles so as people concentrated on engaging with one another rather than trying to abuse the system and grow the numbers!

I for one would rather have 100 quality engaged followers than 10,000 random people who have no interest in what I say or even know who I am. It is however great to see Twitter doing something about the dodgy accounts as this will only help the site grow in the long run.