Would you rather communicate with a list of 19,530 people who don't know you, have no idea if you can be trusted, and are sorting through information from a bunch of other people at the same time OR a list of 200 people who know you, trust you and want to hear what you have to say?

I hope you chose the second option. Your chances of connecting with your list are immensely greater if they know you, trust you and care about what you have to say to them.

And that means your chances of actually selling them something - assuming that's your ultimate goal - are much, much better.

For the last couple of days, there has been this new "viral" Twitter tool making the rounds called Tweeter Getter. The idea is when you send out a Tweet to your followers promoting this tool, you'll automatically be added to the followers list for the 6 people in front of you.

This puts you on the list for any of your followers who also send out the Tweet, for any of their followers who do, and so one down to 6 levels deep. Whenever they send out the message, they get added to your followers list.

In other words, a classic pyramid scheme.

In theory, if 5 people on each level send out the message, you could add 19,530 followers to your account. Those are the numbers used on the website, which I'm not going to link to. If you really want to find it, Google it or use Twitter search.

But here's how it breaks down:

Level 1 (you) - 5 followers
Level 2 - 5×5 = 25 followers
Level 3 - 25×5 = 125 followers
Level 4 - 125×5 = 625 followers
Level 5 - 625×5 = 3125 followers
Level 6 - 3125×5 = 15625 followers

Add them all up and you have 19,530 followers.

Let's just assume for a minute that those numbers are actually realistic. And let's assume that it takes you a month to reach that level.

So 30 days from now, you've got almost 20,000 followers on your Twitter account. Now what?

You might want to send out a promotion of some sort. You've got 20,000 eyeballs going to see it. Fantastic, right?

Not really. Let's examine why:

1. Most of those people won't even see your Tweet. They're trying to follow so many people that they just can't keep up with the huge stream of information coming from Twitter.
2. If they've been trying for more than a few days, chances are good they've already quit trying to read it all.
3. Even if they do see your message, they probably don't know you, don't know if you can be trusted or know what you're talking about, and are highly unlikely to take action on your offer.

But if you sent that same offer out to 200 people that you have been building a relationship with, that trust you and believe you know what you're talking about, and have already taken the action of choosing to follow you, chances are most of them would read it and a certain percentage would take the action you want them to.

It's not about the size of your list, it's about the quality.

It's unfortunate that whenever somebody builds a useful tool on the internet, people looking for ways to eliminate actual work come up with a way to take advantage of it.

I expect this Tweeter Getter thing will burn out in a few weeks, maybe months, when all the people who use it to build a quick list of followers get disillusioned because they're not suddenly making a bucketload of money from their "Twitter list".

Then the people who use Twitter properly can get back to building relationships through old-fashioned hard work. It might not be easy, fast or glamorous, but it works.