The widely held view is that you should have balance between your follows and followers. So, let’s do some sums….

Let’s say an average Twitter user sends 20 messages per day and this is a mix of comments, RTs and original content

And a day is a 10 hours period. (I am not suggesting that you have to do a ten hour day!

So for the purpose of this exercise, an average Twitter user sends two tweets per hour evenly over the day. And, of course, this doesn’t happen in reality!

Let’s see what impact that has on your ability to consume and respond:

Follows	Tweets per hour	Tweets per day
10	20	200
50	100	1,000
200	400	4,000
500	1,000	10,000
1,000	20,000	200,000

Remember, this is in addition to what you are tweeting and responding to in the interest your tweets have generated.

Now, tweeting is also in addition to running your business sure it’s a channel but, to only a very small number is it their whole business.

If you use applications such as Tweetdeck or Outwit, you can set up groups. This effectively zones out tweets from people you are following but aren’t really interesting in.

How does this stack up with transparency?

I say it doesn’t!

This is applying the old marketing ideas and models to the new paradigm.

You can not be a member of more than a few tribes without becoming a lurker and that’s not the same as participating.

Large numbers of follows works in the short term, but we run our businesses for the long term, don’t we?