You nailed it. I have tried to keep my twitter account fairly clean so far in terms of who I follow. For the most part I only want to follow people I know, people I want to know, or people who have been recommended to me. I am only following 97 people at the moment and have no desire to get to the point where I have thousands of people I am following.
Yet another situation where quality totally outshines quantity.
Twitter has some real backend problems if you have lots of followers, your tweets don't seem to get out to all of them. I used to only follow people who I interacted with, now I occasionally delve through my followrs to see if there are people I should follow strategically - people with lists who I want to build a relationship with. It is also convenient for that quick DM rather than what is often the case sending a support ticket.
Do I follow every word... no, I primarily use the web interface - switched power twitter off because of loading time, and also during events I sometimes monitor a twitter search for a hashtag, or fire up Tweetdeck on a second box.
What is funny is how some of the Twitter "royalty" don't realise how their autofollow was affecting the number of followers they gained.
There may be no "right" way to use Twitter, but it just stands to reason that by following more too many people, you actually end up following no one. Also, I get the feeling that a lot of those who are tweeting are doing so without even knowing who they want to reach or why. At what point does it all become a steady stream of overwhelming babble?
The most practical way you can use Twitter is to follow people in the same niche as you. This way, your "tweets" will be seen by people who are interested in your niche.
You're exactly right about how people use twitter. If you're just interested in a big Twitter Army, they you should auto follow everyone that follows you. Twitter users will notice that you're doing this and will add you just to increase their own twitter count.
But the only person who has the right to say how to use Twitter is Twitter itself. Maybe they will ban users that autofollow everyone.
Great post. It sure brought up points about Twitter that I haven't considered.
Why do you use twitter? I use it for different reasons.
Is it a game for getting the most followers? I do like to have more followers than I am following.
Or is it to keep tabs on certain people, and what they’re doing? In the beginning I had the time to read what my select important people were doing now there are too many to "keep tabs."
Or is it to follow ideas? I love some of the sites and people I have found through tweets.
I used SocialToo to auto-follow everybody and things continue growing.
-Interesting to see the auto-follow stats I have never tried that. I like to follow people that I meet or people that I find interesting so I've never tried this or any other tool.
Clean up your twitters. And no better time than the Spring time. #springcleaning09 - I will try #springcleaning09 but I kind of want to try the autofollow as an experiment as well. Decisions, decisions.
Great update to the @Jangro Love/Hate Twitter Relationship.
I have started using Twitter (about a month ago), and while I still only have 16 followers, I have still got feed susbcriptions from them on my blog, which is what I joined Twitter to do, to get targeted traffic, or relatively targeted at least. I like your blog, I'm going to bookmark on my top 10 social nets.
I have been on Twitter for some time, and just recently have seen a sharp increase in the number of people following me. Seems like the name of the game is how many followers you have. I don't really care, as I kind of do my own thing anyway.
I did follow Britney Spears for a while just for fun, and started getting a lot of young girls following me, so I quickly unfollowed her.
I try to stay mostly in my own niche, in the people I follow, although, I am starting to see the possibility to tap into different networks.
This is very exciting.
I appreciate content, and an exchange of ideas, more than a bunch of marketers all trying to sell each other something!
By the way check out this Hot New Product blah, blah... (just kidding)
Steve
© 2012 http://www.jangro.com/
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Why do you use twitter?
Is it a game for getting the most followers?
Or is it to keep tabs on certain people, and what they're doing?
Or is it to follow ideas?
I
HateLove TwitterYou may not know this, but I am the #1 Twitter hater. Don't believe me? Out of over 16 million on the "hate twitter" Google search right now, I'm #1.
That "I hate twitter" post was over a few years ago. I made a public apology a year later on a much more well-read blog, Revenews.com.
I'm not about to tell you how to use twitter and set rules, but I do think this distinguished position does give me some liberties.
Follow All
I was never the type of twitter-user who followed everybody who followed me. Though I did get to the point where I discovered that I was following too many people. How did I know this? I was missing the stuff that I cared about because there was way too much noise in my twitter stream. So I pared the list down to 200 and Twitter was wonderful again.
I recently did an experiment where I started following everybody. I went through my followers and followed everybody that I hadn't been following. That was about 800 or so. An interesting thing happened.
My follower count started growing very quickly. Check it out...
I used SocialToo to auto-follow everybody and things continue growing. Last week I turned off auto-follow and things started to flatten again.
I got tired of not being able to use Twitter any more, and unfollowed anyone I didn't know. The "auto-unfollow" services of my followers immediately kicked in, thus the plummet in my followers list.
During this test, I never followed anybody first (except maybe a few).
Quality vs. Quantity
Does anybody really think that anyone with thousands of followers is reading anything but a select list of tweets? What's the use of an army of followers who follow everybody back? Especially at the expense of having to follow them and ruining twitter for yourself. Neither cares about what each other has to say. It's just a game of who has the biggest, uh, Twitter.
Before you start pitching TweetDeck, I know. I've had several people suggest that I just use TweetDeck and create groups of the people that I really want to follow, which I did. TweetDeck is a great app. But I also like using the web interface and iPhone apps to keep tabs on people. Both are useless with following several hundred people, never mind thousands.
So, I'm back down to following 300 people and I'm loving twitter again.
I'm not telling anyone how to use twitter. There's no "right way". But I like twitter and I'm happy to have it back after this month-long experiment.
Clean up your twitters. And no better time than the Spring time. #springcleaning09