The quality of your content is basically the foundation on which you build “the number of eyes watching you”. And, when it comes to Twitter the quality of your tweets will dictate the number of followers that are actually following you. This is the power of Twitter : having followers that are really interested in what you have to say. It’s not about the number, although this can influence the results of a tweet : it’s about quality.
The thing that you have to pursue is transforming your followers into friends. It’s not easy but by interacting with as many as you can, as often as you can, will start to make it happen. Why do you need friends and not followers ? Well, basically because friends care for you and speak nice of you. Tweeting to friends has more chances to go viral then tweeting to strangers. I see articles about how to create a viral tweet : it doesn’t matter how hard you will try. If no one is used to interact with you on Twitter then it’s more likely your tweet won’t go viral.
Another thing about friends is the fact that they tweet about you without asking them. This is what friends do : talk to each other and sometimes talk about another friend or mentioning him/her or recommend him/her to others.
When @garyvee had about 20k followers on Twitter I followed him and he followed me back. And I felt great because now I’m among the 8k people that Gary Vaynerchuk follows on Twitter while he has over 300k followers. Does this means something ? For all the other users : no. Because if someone is followed on Twitter by power users doesn’t mean I can trust him. Does is matters to me ? YES. Why ? I think it’s because it tells me that maybe Gary saw something in my tweets that he appreciated – and I also have the privilege to send him a direct message, which by the way he answers.
So, to answer the question in the title : Yes, it matters who follows you. You can think of this like a real life situation. If you are not comfortable around certain people would you spend time with them ? No. That is what you have to do on Twitter : find people you can relate to, you can talk about the same common interests and make them your friends. It’s the only way to go viral and to spread your ideas.
Let me know what you think about this. Maybe we can expand this concept in the comments bellow.
I think it does matter who is following you on Twitter. When someone who shares my interests follows me back, it gives me a good feeling that I tweet about relative topics.