There’s something about the statistics that Twitter keeps that touches a primal nerve in us.

Most people who use Twitter are trying to get more followers. Everybody using Twitter knows how many followers they have.

But here’s the thing about the number of followers you have: it doesn’t matter.

Take a recent study by HP Labs that looked at influence on Twitter. It concluded:

“The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it…This opens the possibility of discovering influential individuals within a network which can on average have a further reach than others in the same medium, regardless of their popularity.”

That is, you want the right followers — the ones that will retweet your message — not the most followers.

In an interview with Cnet, Bernardo Huberman, one of the study’s authors, said that if you have a lot of followers on Twitter “I wouldn’t call you influential, I would call you energetic.”

Seth Godin has been hammering this message home for years. Do you want the most eyes, or the right eyes? Do you want the most prospects, or the right prospects? People that know you, he says, are a whole lot more valuable than new people.

And so, the race to 10,000 Twitter followers, or 100,000 is meaningless.

Same with RSS feed subscribers and newsletter subscribers.

It doesn’t matter how many people see your message. It only matters that the right ones see it.