It is time for another poll – this one is about whether you follow more people than you have followers.
Loading ...Feel free to comment on your strategy and reasons for doing what you do (if you have them) below.
Thanks to Patrick O’Keefe for the idea for this poll.
@ann_elise
I’ve been on Twitter 3 days now, and have 19 followers. I know 2… the other 17 who knows. Twitter spam? Maybe, but a few of them look pretty interesting. Hmmm…. looking forward to seeing where this goes.
@JessicaDoyle
If I begin to follow more people than I already am without knowing the person (i.e. have a sense of what their stream is about via conversation with them, have something in common with them or know them via their blog or in real life) I get overwhelmed… not sure if that would be considered a strategy but it works for me and makes me happy.
So, the end result is that I follow less people than follow me on Twitter.
@whoistodd
lol, I think I’m actually guilty of twitter prejudice sometimes. I don’t mean to, but I always (at least subconsciously) assume that people with more followers than people they follow must be more interesting.
Conversely, when I see someone who follows lots of people, and has less followers, I can’t help but wonder why?
Maybe not fair, but that’s how it is.
@cameronstewart
I hit the 2000 people follow limit pretty quickly and have to wait for the number of people following me to catch up – good problem to have as it forces me to engage/build relationships with other twitters first and foremost before following more…steadily growing at +5 / day
@shefaly
Sorry, hate to say this but should it not be “fewer” people rather than “less”?
@PetervanVeen
I prefer to follow less people then I’m following by myself. Don’t know where this will end, I always try to read/scan most of the tweets.
Maybe in the long run I’ll follow more then are following me, but it is not a big question for me.
@monstertalk
I started off following more people and after a couple of months now, the people who are following me have taken over. I don’t really follow people just because they follow me but more if they have something I’d be interested in ‘listening’ to.
@mawbooks
I have no desire to follow the half dozen business card companies that follow me when I happen to say “business cards” or the company across the country that tweets only about their local restaurants. When am I going to go eat there? I follow less simply because they’re SO FAR outside my interests that I often question why in the world they are following me in the first place.
@sandierpastures
Lately, I’ve been followed by girls/women having a pattern in their names: DeliaN1980, RitaJ1975, etc. with updates saying “available and dateless, anyone interested?”. Yikes.
My poll answer is Follow < Followers.
@laikas
It took a while before my follower/following ratio flip-flopped in a favorable (almost) 2:1 ratio. It could have been greater if I didn’t block the Hester24’s and the ppl @messaging me to visit their website.
Having many followers or a positive follower/following ratio is not my goal. I just want to keep twitter manageable, keeping noise at an acceptable level.
@pen4hire
I follow slightly more people than are following me at the moment, but when it gets even, I start looking for more people to follow, or try to unfollow unproductive relationships. When I aggressively follow more people, I find that the numbers equal out again fairly soon. There are SO MANY people following me these days in whom I have no interest whatsoever. Wish they’d go away.
@savorytv
I follow several prestigous foodies (and non f00d twitterers) who will most likely never follow me back, and I would never name names here…however I am still happy to follow them and look forward to their updates.
That said, the number of followers still trumps the number that I follow, not that I care really. My simple rules for following back are: Do you discuss anything other than promoting yourself? Do you @reply once in a while? Are you amusing, contributing to a good cause, or respectable in some way?
I cannot clog my stream up with people who I am not interested in, followers or not. Time is precious. It’s not about the numbers.
@alwaysoptional
I follow the large majority of people who follow me, plus those who I find interesting through other means. When I have a new follower I’ll check their bio and recent tweets. Mostly for any subject matter that I may be somewhat interested in. If I find it I follow back.
Not sure where the majority of my followers come from, but I have been getting 4 or 5 new followers a day lately.
@iheartguitar
I have a little guitar blog. I follow 228 and I currently have 395 followers. I’m finding it hard to keep up and I’m missing a lot of discussion if I try to follow too many people at once, and I’ve also found myself unfollowing a few people who tweet so frequently that they tend to fill up the screen. I’m still trying to find my ideal balance for twitter use, between staying in touch with my readers, staying in touch with other guitar bloggers, and following various people and companies who I find interesting. It would be great to be able to sort them into groups.
@thinkthinkers
Our numbers seem to be stabilising, but we’d still follow more than who follow us at the moment. I try to only follow people whose tweets I want to read for varying reasons, and thanks to tweetdeck it’s easy enough to organise them into categories, depending on why I followed them.
@cammo
My Twitter number are close – 597 followers and 523 following. However I do think I set up an autofollow that forgot about!
(Thanks for the reminder)
I just stumbled upon a porn star that I was following but didn’t even realise. Her profile doesn’t really show she is a porn star so I got a surprise when I clicked on her website!
@rickybuchanan
I tend to initially follow people who follow me if it seems they have a likelihood of being interesting and don’t seem like a spammer, and then ruthlessly prune who I’m following as I read – if anybody’s tweets seem boring or overly repeditive or irrelevant to me or whatever, I’ll just stop following them.
I had no idea, BTW, what the ratio or absolute numbers were for who I’m following until I looked it up for this question – I really don’t care about it.
@phillipgibb
I am pretty sure that people follow me in an attempt to get me to follow them and then stop following me – maybe for some sort of rating. I notice this in their duplicate attempts and the ratio of followers to followees that they have. So I don’t follow them.
And of course the product or url spammers, I don;t follow them back, in fact I block some of them.
In the end I have more followers than people I follow.
@samullidesign
I follow more people than I have followers right now. Frankly, I am quite surprised to have as many followers as I do, because with most of them I have no idea who they are or why in the world they follow me (I even had John Chow follow me at some point – WTF, I don’t even read his blog). I follow a couple of my favorite authors and actors, which I don’t expect to ever follow me back, but it’s nice to keep up with their tweets and sometimes comment on them. Same goes for some pro bloggers and designers.
Apart from that there are only a handful of people I actually know and interact with on a regular basis in my list. I often follow new people for a while to see if they have anything of interest to say. If not, they will get culled from my list at some point. But all in all I’m still trying to get the hang of this Twitter thing and figure out the best way for me to use it, so I don’t overly concern myself with follower counts and such.
Shefaly is right: It should be follow fewer people, not “less people”.
Rule of thumb: fewer applies to number, less applies to quantity.
So if the noun is plural (people, glasses…) the word to use is “fewer” (My doctor said I should cut back to fewer than two glasses of wine a day). But if the noun is singular (land, wine…) you’ll use “less” (I’m going to drink less wine). Measurements can provide the exception because some are thought of as singular units even though expressed as a plural (e.g. less than $100).
@ramblingreba
I follow more or less the same number of people who follow me. I don’t follow back EVERYONE, though, so it’s somewhat “luck” that this happened.
@Gaelen2
I answered ‘the same’ because my follower:followed ratio is usually 1:1; there’s sometimes a difference of up to +/- 5 if I haven’t logged on for a few hours. I won’t follow someone with any combination of no profile, weblink to a commerce website, bio claiming to provide everything I need in SEO, no updates or updates which only link back to blog posts or promote his/her business, etc. I will block and report as spammers people w/porn websites or obvious spam. I do follow people who provide interesting conversations and information, even if I don’t know them, but I won’t just auto-follow someone looking to expand his/her own follower base who offers nothing in which I’m interested.
@jaledwith
Up until recently I’d been following about 20 or so more people than were following me. But this past weekend I had a major swing in the other direction. Now I’ve got 6 more people following me than I follow. It’s amazing how a couple of tweets will attract so many new followers.
@tumblemoose
Wow. Interesting numbers in the poll. We have ourselves a gen-u-wine Florida Presidential going.
I think that if you organically grow your Twitter account, you should naturally end up with more followers than who you are following. I get all kinds of followers that I’ll never follow back (@nukethegaywhalesforchrist and such)
Cool poll
George
@OrganizedFellow
I follow 34, yet have 43 followers.
I found that using TweetDeck, and commenting to worthy topics that I follow, has yielded me some good followers.
My buddy prides himself on having over 100 followers, but when I asked him, ‘how many of them are interesting?’, he was like WTF? IDK!
Dumb, I told him. He and others I know use Twitter like an instant messenger app amongst local friends.
I have yet to yield the benefits of Twitter, but am getting closer!
@notbovvered
I have more followers than people I’m following. My ’strategy’ is simple:
1. When someone follows me, I look at their twitter name/id;
2. If it looks genuine, I check out their profile and updates;
3. If we seem to have a common interest, I follow back.
In general I’m more likely to follow back if the follower has completed their profile and given a website where I can find out more about them.
@hectorhenry17
Well in my case its happend that i use to have a lot of fallowing more that doze than doze that fallowme, but i maek a clean up becuase i wasen able to keep up whit all doze tweet and in fact all doze tweet wasen that good for me.
@pcNielsen
I actually don’t pay attention to those numbers; just glad to find new people to follow and be followed by new people — *assuming* they are relevant follows.
@ghodgkins
I voted “even” though my ratio always slightly favors “following” – currently 358 to 299. I’m only a month into the “Twitter experience” and am building a following. If you build organically, I think the balance will always favor “following.”
My strategy is simple. I search topics that interest me & follow people who have something interesting to say about those topics. If they follow me back, I send a thank you.
The only time I delete someone I’m following is if their posts are annoying or completely irrelevant to me — in other words, if I made a mistake following them in the first place.
One number I always look at when deciding whether to follow back someone who’s followed me is the number of “updates” — does the number make sense compared to the number of followers and following. Good writers can craft posts that look “real” but the statistics can often flush our spammers (e.g., 7000 followers, 4000 following, 15 updates).
I don’t obsess about these numbers, but I do like to see a balance. When the balance is off, there’s a problem.
@gscottoliver
Like @rickybuchanan, I had to look up my numbers to respond to the poll. I follow less and fewer people than I have followers.
And like @notbovvered, I read bios, updates, and sometimes favorites to decide whether to follow someone, whether they followed me first or I learned of them from #followfriday. But I look at every new follower’s profile, even if they have a suspicious-looking username.
@marynelson1
What I want from Twitter has evolved to this: I mostly want to follow a set of “high value” contacts and information sources. And I’ve found that a number of people follow me just to hawk their products and services, sometimes dozens of times a day. When I interpret that to be the case (review bios and notice if their tweets involve mostly their offerings and websites), I tend not to follow or quickly unfollow. As a result, I’m also trying to use a third-party program more and more, in order to filter and segment. For about two weeks now, I’ve been wondering if there will come a time when Twitter becomes information overload, in spite of the high value contacts and information I’m receiving from it. I’ve given up on the reciprocity idea; it hasn’t worked for me, due to repeated “Twimercials”.
@kirstenl4w
I think I follow a few more people than the number of followers I have, but I’m striving to keep it about even.
@kurtavish
I follow less than the followers I have.
@brandonleetran
This is a great question. I have been asking this myself. I see these twitter profiles where they are following 20000 people and they have 20000 followers. Does that put them into the category of people who just follow people to gain followers in hopes that someone will read their tweets? Can you really actually follow 20,000 people’s comments? I personally don’t understand how that could be. I only follow people that I am influenced by. People that I admire and want to hear what they are tweeting about.
@laoden
I follow fewer than follow me. following 122 / followers 226. I basically use much of the same manual protocol which other have described. If you’re profile starts with “I can get you massive followers…” or “I can help you BUY followers…” not only will I not follow you. You’ll get the big BLOCK. I very much enjoy the tweets of most of those I follow, as we have great interaction. Leave the hardsell for the infomercials!
Here is my recommendation for the next poll – To block, or not to block. Would love to see the comments on that topic.