Why absolutely no-one else cares about your Twitter stats.

'This week I gained 10 new followers, 4 retweets and 6 favourites,' says the message, staring out at me from within my screen. It looks at me with a smug look of self satisfaction, grinning broadly with digital pride. 'Look at me!' it shouts. 'Look at how good I am!'

And that's where we find the first issue. These automatic Twitter stats are all about how good you are, they're all about what you have done. They mean nothing to the rest of us. As someone who works in social media I know exactly how important these types of metrics are and I know how exciting it can feel when they're up a little bit compared to what you've had before. But trying to explain that excitement to other people is like sending a bouquet of flowers to a girl with a restraining order out against you; pointless. The stats only matter if you've had something to do with their creation. For example if you were the designer behind a particularly good Facebook update I am sure you'd be chuffed to know exactly how many likes it got, how many people engaged with it and how often it was shared. It's great to see the results of your labour in numerical form like that. However if you've had nothing to do with it then why would you ever care?

The same applies with Twitter stats.

The second issue, and the one that bugs me even more, is that often the stats people are posting aren't really worth bragging about at all. Those 10 new followers you got last month might mean a lot to you but compared to the thousands someone else got it really doesn't look that impressive. Save the updates for when you've done something that merits a bit of showing off. We'll all clap and scream wildly the day one of your tweets gets retweeted a hundred times, we'll all say well done if you get one of those special tweets due to how many favourites you got (well, maybe, I'm not too sure about them either) but for as long as you're just plodding along like the rest of us it would be best for everyone if the stat sharing stopped.

By all means keep a personal record, in fact if you use Twitter as a marketing tool I would strongly recommend keeping a record because it can be very rewarding to see how all your hard work has paid off. But when that record is done, keep it to yourself.

It's meaningless, it's a little bit smug and it's not as interesting as your usually good quality tweets.
People follow you for a reason, your Twitter stats are not it.

I am pretty impressive.