Will Someone Please Explain...

I've recently become fascinated with the rash of people who've been offering me followers in exchange for various favours. 'Follow me and I can bring you 1000 followers in a day' 'Follow ME and I'll bring you 5000'. Whoa.

I just about refrained from having a party when I hit 1000 and I'm planning to sacrifice my son at 2000, but to have 5000 wow, wonderful, amazing, incredible but...

What do followers actually DO?

Well yeah, of course they                                                                      but what exactly does that mean? What do I want it to mean?

I have three expectations, no call then desire from twitter

1. To meet interesting people, have fun and make new friends.
2. To meet interesting people, promote my work and gain sales for my books/greater recognition as a writer
3. Promote other people who may very well become rich and famous one day and will remember who helped then get there... not really, just to help promote others because we're all in the same boat and that's what we should do for each other.

This is where the idea of the 'instant followers' confuses me. What purpose do they serve. Whilst there may well be many interesting and useful people in there, what are the odds that I'll actually get to meet them. I certainly won't be checking out all their blogs like I do now, so how will I find the interesting ones?

Well 5000 followers are going to promote my books at least right? Well, I'm not so sure about that either. Building up slowly as I am now, I'm getting a 'feel' for my followers, people I like, people I can have a laugh with, people I admire, those I share a (slightly sick) sense of humour and even those I flirt with (Gods forbid). 

Although I try to read everyone's blog and promote all of my followers that clearly isn't possible. So who do I promote? The people I know and like and am interested in and have spoken to or admire or seek to emulate or are just crazy fascinating interesting guys (and gals) The key point is, and this has been brought home to me recently making lists, that I actively promote the people I know, and promote progressively less actively those I don't know, haven't spoken to and haven't had anything particularly outstanding to knock me off my feet.

Consequently, I spend a lot of time and get a lot of pleasure from promoting from a fairly fluid and comparatively small group of people. I don't just re tweet, I read blogs, leave comments now and again and exchange words with other authors, artists, musicians, nice people, strange people, poets... well... people.

Even now, with 1150 followers I don't, and can't promote them all and I am certainly not promoted by all of them because presumably they have the same methodology as me... promote who I know or what I like.

With 5000 new followers in 1 day surely what will happen is this

1. My 'pool' is diluted so it's harder to see the people I'm really interested in.

2. Everyone else's pool is diluted so it's harder to see me.

3. I'm not going to be able to get around to reading 5000 new blogs so i'm not going to get to know any of the new people so they're not likely to get promoted much if at all. 

4. None of the 5000 are really going to know me and, if they've been 'acquired' then they're not really going to be interested in me. Okay maybe i'll get 5000 shout outs but if no one's listening what's the point

Right now my preferred method is the chipping away... or filtering through... one. I get new followers in a small but steady stream enabling me to at least look at the blog of each new follower, make at least one post in support and add to my lists anything that interests me. That way I'm keeping control of my pool and i know everyone who's in it.

If there really is some hidden benefit to the follow five thousand then please let me know because right now I really can't see it and I can't see how the mere number rather than the quality of the followers is really of much assistance at all other than to make you feel good when you log in.