I marked another online community milestone today: 10,000 Facebook subscribers. And I am pretty excited about it.

Next if not already, social media editors — with conspicuously smaller communities — will be droning on about how Facebook subscriber totals, like Twitter followers, don’t mean a thing. They will be right and they will be wrong.

For example, studies over the last couple of years have proven that many Twitter followers represent either spam accounts — or more likely — visitors who tried Twitter for a day and never came back. And we have all seen the stories about politicians and others buying followers.

So true, but equally incomplete. I don’t put much faith in the numbers, but trends, proportions and perception also come into play.

While many other facets of social media identity can work for journalists, will a source be more likely to respond to a tweet if you have thousands of followers or just dozens? Can’t we infer a little about Twitter accounts which grow, stagnate or contract?

I had a great deal of success as an early adopter with Twitter – with over 80,000 followers — but my tweets rarely resulted in over 250 clicks. Sticky content meant more, and it was fun when that happened, but not incredibly rewarding.

The real benefits come with the countless personal relationships that have emerged. “I follow you” has been a priceless ice breaker at professional events because it proves and reminds us of out mutual interests. Of course, this happens as well without great followers counts.

More recently, I have shifted my online reporting efforts — with a combination of original, crowd-sourced and curated content — to my personal Facebook profile. The Facebook subscription function made this platform more expansive than my previous journalist page — about four times over during the first few months.

Curiously, I get many more new subscriber notices than the total seems to represent, and more than a few names look like random keystrokes — as if the spam follower process is repeating itself. Many of the comments would seem to endorse this perception as well. Perhaps others unsubscribe because I post too often or because they don’t like the content.

Beats me, but amid the churn and spam I am finding more community — with real discussions — happening on Facebook than I have ever experienced as an individual user. Of course there is little opportunity for direct monetization via Facebook — but what I learn about community development, content consumption, and myself — is no less than priceless.

I missed the early wave of blogging but every social media experience since then has proven that early adoption is the key. The good news, I think, is that it’s still pretty early in the subscription process. Get started today!

Evangelists tell me that Google+ plus will next open the social space — thanks to their integration with search, YouTube, Blogger and more — but for the moment, I’m hitching my wagon right here. Subscribers matter to me.