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Yet Another Article on Twitter: Just How Desperate Are You for Followers, Anyway?

I started this article with a much more benign direction, but then a few things happend:

1. During the SocStardom2 event, social media marketer Dave Evans said about his management of Twitter followers (paraphrasing), “The goal is to have as many people in my network who can answer questions I don’t even have right now.” (As opposed to having more restrictive rules for friending/following on networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.)

2. About the same time, Julia Angwin wrote a pretty good Twitter 101 primer in her WSJ blog, where she quotes Biz Stone stating the eminently-obvious fact, “Twitter is fundamentally a broadcast system” (or as Valleywag put it, “Twitter is for self-promotion“).

3. A few minutes ago, I was just followed on Twitter by someone who:

* Had a keyboard mash username

* Whose only update was a “free laptop” spam URL

* Who was already following 2,000 people

* And, who aready had 100 followers

Now, #1 by itself is not too bad, and #2 is okay, too. But add 1+2, and you end up with people doing wacky stuff like #3, where people are so keen to build their follower network, that they indiscriminately and automatically follow anyone who follows them — even an obvious spammer… and probably also indiscriminately follows anyone, hoping for the reciprocal follow.

This “how do I get more followers?” question, of course, is eerily reminiscent of people playing the “How many friends do you have?” game on MySpace, and the answer is the same: Already be famous, and/or show a lot of cleavage.

Granted, Twitter looks to be a lot more useful at this point, but we’ll see how long that stays if barely-restrained Twitter follower-seeking becomes the norm. If anything is going to drive people off of Twitter, it’ll be this, and we’ll end up with a vast wasteland of self-promoting marketers blasting tweets at each other.

A-ha, you say, but wait: What about @replies? Doesn’t that make things actual conversations, and help build real relationships? Sure, but I would also argue that to a large extent, because @replies are public, it’s basically another excuse for you to show off to show off to all your followers.

It’s along the lines of a scene in Pulp Fiction (might be a deleted scene, I’ll have to check my copy later) where Mia asks Vincent if, “In a conversation, do you listen, or do you wait to talk?”

We know how Twitter self-promoters will (or should) answer that one.

Of course, unrestrained follower-seeking is only one of the user behaviors on Twitter. Over at Mashable, Elliot Kosmicki takes more reserved approach in The Twitter Followholic: An Epidemic.

Now, originally, I was going to ask what would be the best keywords to use to troll for Twitter followers (for example, I posted about how I was not going to SXSW this year, and instantly got added because by someone because I used the word “sxsw” in my post, which I don’t think anyone would find particularly useful.)

I’m still asking for your suggestions: What’s the best Twitter follower-bait? I’ll post them and my own concoctions from a new username I’ve set up for this purpose. And I’m going to make it clear that I will not follow you, because I’ll be twittering from @IWillNotFollowU.

So, just how desperate are you for followers? Leave a comment.

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