I was talking with an acquaintance who told me he knew someone who could get 7000 followers in about days on Facebook. By followers he meant people on a personal page, as opposed to a business page. It sounds impressive, but I asked him what 7000 followers really meant, beyond the numbers itself. I pointed out to him that shear numbers alone weren't enough to determine how influential a person was.
Something which is sometimes overlooked in social media is that social media isn't just a technology interface. The peril of treating social media as a technology interface is that people don't recognize they are dealing with people on the other end of the interface. Because social media is mostly a textual medium, this becomes a problem, because you are only communicating with 7% of the total human language. Social etiquette is especially important in order to meaningfully connect with people.
The other problem is that even if you are connected to 7000 people, your ability to relate to those people is truncated by the volume of people and your ability to be able to know those people. Being connected to 7000 people doesn't mean much if they are just numbers, and if you can't provide a way to interact with the people. Being able to keep up with all those people is hard and even if you're just using using the account to update people, at a certain point people want personal interaction with you.
7000 people seems impressive. But what makes that impressive is not the number of people, but the quality of relationship you have with those people. The reason celebrities are sometimes so well-regarded is because they know how to create an intimate illusion of connection with people. They've had to learn how to do this and now social media requires that same ability. Can you provide a way for people to feel connected to you so that they are motivated to action? That question is key to really determining if social media can enable meaningful social connections that provide people the motivation to not jut stay online, but go to a store, event, or party as a result of finding out about it through social media.