What does it mean to have 10K Twitter followers?

Somebody on Twitter asked me over the weekend what it means to have 10K Twitter followers. Since most people learn in grade school that 'K' used in a numeric context means "thousand," I have to assume that the person's question was rhetorical in nature rather than numerical. Either that, or he failed 5th grade.

Still, let me make it perfectly clear. Having 10K Twitter followers means just one thing. It means you have ten times more than 1K Twitter followers.

It's important for me to have an audience, because by profession I'm a person who transfers knowledge and influences opinion. If I have a larger audience, I'm more effective at what I do. That's fundamentally why I went about the six-month-long task of trying to attract and keep ten thousand Twitter followers, a goal I reached on Sunday.

Of course, it doesn't help to have followers if they are all robots, nut cases, and mouthbreathers. Quality counts. Unfortunately, Twitter attracts its share of hucksters, scammers, lamers, and marketing hangers-on, and many of them spend their days and nights trying to follow people in hopes of a pingback of some kind. I have some of those people in my 10K, but not so many as to make the remainder not worth having. In fact, I count the quality of my follower list to be extremely high, and I'll explain why I think that -- and just how I got to the 10K mark, incidentally -- tomorrow.