How Many Followers Are Too Many?

One of the goals of social networking is to connect to as many people as possible. But there's a problem: when you're connected with too many people, you can't really connect to them in a meaningful way.

In Wired, Clive Thompson wrote "In Praise of Online Obscurity," makes the point that "It's great to have a dedicated group of followers online -- until the audience gets so big that the conversation stops...At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."

The bottom line, according to Thompson: "There’s value in obscurity" even if that goes against what companies are trying to achieve with social media.