Although I quite liked the idea initially, I have to say I’m in two minds over this – personal and professional; personally, I think it’s a good idea as there’s nothing more tedious than people willy-waving over their follower counts or thinking that having 1000s really matters; it also would discourage the MySpace-ish behaviour done by a minority, of following thousands of people just to crank up your own following.

Professionally though, Twitter followers is a quick way of working out who might be best to talk to about a campaign or a client; of course other more complex measurements are far better indicators of community participation and influence – such as the quality of Tweeting, how conversational and engaged they are, how many replies they receive, how often they are retweeted etc. But follower numbers are a good and quick way of filtering out the least engaged.

Maybe if Twitter dropped the raw followed & follower count and replaced it with an engagedness factor that took the above into account, then that could go some way to providing more meaningful figures. But with that it mind, any statistical system can be gamed, and the less worthwhile community members will always find unscrupulous ways of jacking their own ‘score’ up.

Interesting. I’m the same as you. I tell everyone that I only follow people on Twitter that I’m interested in when in actual fact there’s a whole range of criteria I use when choosing whether to follow someone or not which includes something as simple as what mood I’m in. Certainly numbers do play a role in it. However, increasingly its more to do with checking whether they are spammy or not.

I voted against Twitter hiding follower numbers, because it is useful for me work-wise to know who has high popularity (whether this equates to influence or not is questionable, though there’s obviously some overlap).

I don’t think I would hide my followers, more to do with the fact that I couldn’t be bothered rather than anything else tbh.

I totally agree that the first thing I look at when someone follows me is their following/follower ratio. If they follow more people than they’re being followed by I automatically think they’re spammers (which is unduly harsh but the truth). At the beginning twitter didn’t have the follower/following numbers in the e-mails and I made more of an effort to discover more about them unless they had xxx in their twitter handle!

I think the key is if you follow someone and you’re really interested in what they’re tweeting you need to join the conversation, this will get you noticed and will potentially lead to a follow back. More recently I’ve noticed a lot of people who are following me, who I’m not following because they’ve responded to one of my tweets. I then check them out and 90% of the time follow them back.

Everyone has their own take on this. I’m generally for not hiding numbers but then it isn’t the first thing that I look for – I actually look at activity which is to Sean’s point and then I look to see who somebody is following as an indicator (on the basis that we choose who we follow and that tells the world something about us as against somebody else’s choice to follow us) I follow to get a sense of what the conversation is in certain areas that I’m interested in and the possibility of better understanding what is behind the conversation. I tend to follow ‘people’ as against organisations on the basis that what the organisations are saying is generally published more formally and I’ll pick that up through other channels. From individuals though I might pick up something that adds to what is said more formally elsewhere. To that end, I follow across many genres – PR people and the media because it is my trade, politicans and political commentators because I’m interested and it is the subject of news, people in the tech sector because it is the future, people in entertainment so that I can have a little insight for the coffee break and bedtime story conversation (when you’re Dad to a 7yr old girl, the thoughts of Miley Cyrus are really important to know!) and people in sport because that is my great obsession in life.

In all that, after activity, the numbers are less important to me than the opportunity to see who those that I might wish to follow are themselves following but as a general trend towards maintaining a greater element of transparency, I’d be for keeping them