How Aggressively Do You Police Your Twitter Followers?
February 5, 2009 :: Joe LoongI run a pretty tight ship when it comes to my contacts on Twitter. Maybe too tight, I’m not sure — at this moment, I follow 175 people and have 218 people follow me. Of the people I follow, most are people I know, or have at least met (outside of one unfortunate incident where I accidentally mass-followed a whole bunch of people from one of my address books).
I’m not an automatic follower: When someone starts following me, I check them out. If I don’t know them, and their posts or blog holds no interest for me, I don’t follow them. And when someone I don’t know starts following me within seconds after I posted, I figure that they’re a random person who found me off the public timeline, are probably just looking for another pair of eyeballs and a reciprocal, automatic follow, and are therefore not worth my time.
The same thing goes for a follower, who, after looking at their profile, clearly followed me because I used a phrase that their Twitter search hit on.
And of course, obvious spammers are right out: *BLOCK*
What I said previously about having lots of Internet Marketing friends notwithstanding, for me, the number of Twitter followers isn’t a race, and it’s not a contest. (Remember, I also said that people are not tools — people are relationships, and I guess I’m just not that promiscuous to have that many relationships at once. You may be different. I’m not judging you. Well, maybe I am, a little.)
Contrast that with social self-promoters and internet marketers on Twitter, who seem to think that more is better (after all, how else are you going to get to up to 1,200 followers to promote your bacon products to?), but I don’t like it. Primarily because I have enough trouble already, trying to keep up with the paltry 175 people I follow, even using a desktop client (Twhirl, currently).
Anyway, in a bit of serendipity, I saw a link retweeted by Geoff Livingston about a pack mentality amongst all the marketers and social media types on Twitter — specifically, how they (er, we) don’t use Twitter the same way other people use Twitter — not the least of which is, since we have so many people to follow, that we don’t use the Web interface, but instead use a desktop client (guilty, as noted).
Outside of being an interesting in-group/out-group identifier, I think it’s useful to keep in mind that we heavy Twitter followers are the outliers (for now), and that a lot of what we say may just not be useful to people who aren’t that invested.
I’m reminded of a similar experience with Buddy Lists. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but at the time, the average Buddy List user had significantly fewer than 10 Buddies, whereas we heavy IM users usually had hundreds. So some of the problems we were trying to solve (like how to managing large groups of contacts) weren’t the problems that a lot of people actually had (no Buddies to talk to).
Anyway, the point of all this is to remember that, even when we’re eating our own dogfood, our palates — the way we use the tools — are still different from other people who don’t eat and breathe this stuff.
Feedback time: Are we social media insiders just patting each other on the back, or are we being shining examples to the masses on how they should behave? Is mass following the future? Am I being a poor self-promoter by not following more people? Please leave a comment below.
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