Take Twitter Back

by Scott Jangro on 13 March 2009

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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 Hate Love Twitter

You 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.

hate twitter-1.png

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…

twittergraph-1.png

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

Tagged as:

  • I'm not into Twitter that much either. I like my free time to be free and not use my mobile phone to update my twitter status when I'm doing something fun
  • 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
  • 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.
  • It does help me increase page views, but damn is it asinine.
  • I hate and love Twitter. Im going to do some spring cleaning right now. Ihave too many people on my list that I really don care about hearing from. Thanks for the post
  • Twitter is getting addictive for people, I just saw an video about twitter and how people are so into the micro blogging thing from the current website.
  • True Post , twitter had now become mainly the you follow me and I follow you game which is of no use Every bosy want a long list of followers who follow you only if you follow them . and Quality is lost because of quantity
  • I agree that quality wins. Sometimes I think that Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all just a huge time eater. I think I need to do a little spring cleaning...
  • 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.
  • how funny to see all the auto follow reaction. watch all those sheep follow. 100-200 is enough people to follow for me with those who are mostly "off topic" removed pretty soon after.
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