by John Newman from Tag Surfer (@anthroscience)
Recently a colleague of mine and I organized a very successful tweet-up here in Tallahassee. For those of you who don’t know, a tweet-up is a live meeting between fellow tweeters. It was there that I came to realize just how powerful Twitter can be as a networking tool. At the tweet-up I was able to exchange business cards with a hair stylist, a graphic design artist, an open source web host, a real estate agent, and a DJ, just to name a few.
Amazed that I had been able to organize so many resources into a single place, I decided to start watching out for some of the little things that could potentially hinder my ability to build a real life network through Twitter. Here, I would like to share with you some of my findings in the form of Twitter’s little known stereotypes.
1. The Fickle Follower
Every so often I’ll receive an email telling me @so-and-so is now following me on Twitter. Like a good neighbor, I’ll make a point to drop him an @reply every now and again, and perhaps even a DM if I have some special message to send. The thing about @so-and-so, however, is that he ignores all direct communication I send him. Then, one day, I’ll log on to Twitter and notice that I’m down a follower. Whether it’s by means of Qwitter, twitter.grader.com, or something else, I come to find out that this Fickle Follower has indeed unfollowed me.
To the Fickle Follower: Why did you follow me in the first place? Of course, there are many reasons people use Twitter and not all of them involve networking. However, if your purpose is to network, being a Fickle Follower means that you are making a few fundamental mistakes.
- You’re not engaging in real conversations. Though your posts and links may be brilliant, being a lone wolf will cancel out your content for many a potential follower. In fact, Mashable’s Atherton Bartleby has listed this problem in his top 10 reasons he won’t return follow you on Twitter.
- You’re not presenting yourself as someone who is a worthwhile network member. When @theprguy and I planned our tweet-up, the manager of the restaurant where we held it needed an estimate of how many would be attending. It goes without saying that we did not reserve a spot for the Fickle Follower in town.
- That itchy trigger finger may be causing you to miss out on some great tweets. Unless someone says something to really offend you, it may be best to keep them on your list. After all, you never know when they might retweet one of your posts and bring you a few more followers.
2. The Mad Scientist
Once in a while you’ll come across a really overt Twitter tester. He’ll be the one disguised behind an avatar portraying an unusually attractive young female with 5 updates, 200 followers, and following 40,000. His experiment is to determine whether or not the attractive avatar will bring him more followers than the average guy trying the follow-insane-amounts-of-people tactic.
However, other mad scientists prefer to experiment with their ideas on a legitimate account. It turns out there’s no faster way to make your numbers drop than to spend a week tweeting only in some little known foreign language or unfollowing half of your network just to “see what happens.”
If you must do experiments like these, I recommend setting up a separate account. Otherwise you may be destroying your Twitter persona and causing yourself to be viewed as an unreliable network member.
3. The Impulsive Tweeter
Sometimes you just can’t help it. Though you’ve spent months or even years developing your Twitter personality (perhaps the local Apple guru, or the girl with the inside info on “Grey’s”), the pressure becomes too great and you have an outburst. You abandon your usual routine for one fleeting moment of “Republicans are soooo dumb!”
Of course, the word “Republicans” in that phrase could easily be substituted by Democrats, religious people, atheists, or whatever you consider “dumb.”
True, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with expressing how you feel about something. However, the real truth is that you’ve probably just lost a good number of followers. It is important to note that even if you think such-and-such type people are “dumb,” they can still make great resources of products, services, and other kinds of information.
Once you have carved out your Twitter niche, I would recommend that you keep within it as much as possible. In much the same way that saying “managers are dumb” in the middle of a job interview will greatly hinder your chance at getting the job, too many outbursts taken as distasteful by your followers will greatly inhibit your ability to network.
What to do instead
If you absolutely must perform obscure Twitter experiments and give the occasional controversial shout out, I would recommend either making them part of your niche or setting up an alternative Twitter account for those kinds of things. Otherwise, you’ll find that by engaging your followers, only unfollowing when absolutely necessary, and sticking to what your followers have come to expect, you will make your city’s top 50 list in no time.
More importantly, no matter how small your network is, it will be strong. You’ll be considered a valuable asset by your followers and, whatever reason you have to network, that reason will be realized. Using this method, I’ve focused more on real life networking than anything else. Though I may not have followers in the zillions, I am part of a reliable network of real people I can turn to whenever I need just about anything.
@iamaconsultant
Great post and I want to comment on unfollowing. I do think there are times when unfollowing is necessary. For example, I used to follow a person because they tweeted on a certain topic that was important to me. However, half of his tweets were about the local weather. Tweeting about the local weather just doesn’t add much value in the global world of twitter. In fact, it overwhelms and obscures the tweets I found valuable. In this case, I think it’s wiser to follow this person through search feeds instead of formally following them. Maybe tweeting etiquette deserves a post….
@tumblemoose
Very timely.
Just last night I received email notification that @so and so was following me. I went to their profile and it looked ok. A good follow/follower ratio, decent # of tweets, website listed.
I clicked “follow” and it says the knucklehead has BLOCKED me! What the…
So, ’splain that one to me someone.
Crazy.
Cheers
George
@54degrees
Fickle Follower seems to be a marketing-method these days.
People follow you and hope for re-follow and then unfollow a couple of days later. Most twitters don’t use some tool like qwitter and won’t recognice that it was him/her.
Good way to push up follower-counts without having a bad follow-ratio.
I strongly recomment everyone to use tools like qwitter to identify this method
@MikeRalph
I’m just starting on the Twitter concept and am researching as much as I can to help me in my development, some good information and I have bookmarked this site to help. Kee it up
)
Must admit I seem to be being added by lots of people and they disappear, could be the twitter spammers I suppose…
Mike
@monicahamburg
Interesting that the Fickle Twitter Follower’s reputation online is spilling over into his real life rep. Good to hear – it’s sad what people think they can get away with online, that they would shy away from doing in real life.
As for the unfollow – that’s always tricky territory. I think tools like Qwitter mostly enable the paranoid. That said, I imagine it is useful for picking out fickle followers…
@cleanybeany
John Newman’s post has so many good points and shows that these twitter connections are are emotional connections. No one likes to be rejected. I would rather have someone not follow me than, follow/unfollow. And for awhile I was checking out Tweeteffects.com. That is truly crazy making. Maybe think twice before you unfollow someone after a questionable tweet, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
@stephauteri
Though I don’t know that I’d qualify as a full-blown fickle follower, I must admit: I do sometimes unfollow someone when it slowly dawns on me that they’re not providing useful/entertaining dialogue or information; their entire feed consists of @ replies, yet no original tweets; I start to feel as if I’m being spammed, etc.
When someone unfollows you, it can sometimes help to ask yourself: Did I do something wrong? Have I become boring or unhelpful? Am I not maintaining a dialogue with my followers? That’s why apps like Qwitter let you know which tweet precipitated the unfollow.
Then again…sometimes an unfollow is just as unfollow…
@anthroscience
@tumblemoose, If I had to guess, it sounds like a mad scientist doing some crazy experiment to me.
@Karsten, good point. Like you pointed out though, you end up with a network made up of auto followers. Some of the best people in my network didn’t return follow me right at first.
@anthroscience
@stephanerd, I certainly wouldn’t count you as a fickle follower. You’ve identified a largely known Twitter stereotype (the @reply maniac) and decided he/she wasn’t doing anything for you. Good show.
@ecomind
A great educating article here. Something I see have to work on – improve my Twitter network. Trying to learn why some followers drop out on me. This gave me some helpful tip.
Cheers..
@lordmatt
Always, always do the insane things in a sandbox. I set out to feed an insane number of feeds into one twitter account. So I spent some time themeing up a new account, doing art work for it and setting up the feeds etc. I was right that it was far to much too fast for my regular followers but the strange thing was that the account spent a long time at the top slot as the fastest growing account on twitter. It has 4 to 5 times the number of followers I have… but they all follow the account for a different reason to the more intimate group I know on my main account. I would have hated to loose those long time twitter faces just to get a higher number of followers.
@filos
Very nice article. I wrote a similar one a couple of days ago.
http://www.lucafiligheddu.com/2009/02/what-twitter-user-are-you-the-seven-twitterers.html
@ornaross
I’m new to twitter and maybe I’m missing something. But doesn’t it depend on why you’re using twitter? Why this assumption that we should all be growing our communities willy-nilly? Personally, I am not interested in you-follow-me-i’ll- follow-you, whether it’s links on/to my blog or tweets. I want to follow only those tweeters i’m interested in reading — and I only want people following me if they are interested in what I have to say. If somebody unfollows me, fine. I assume I’m not relevant to their needs right now. Cool. Much as we might wish it otherwise, those of us with fulltime jobs offline, and families to raise, can only spend a limited amount of time reading/writing on twitter — and are less interested in the size of our community (whether followers or following) than in the strength of our connections.
@starfeeder
I started out twittering wrong, following everyone that followed me back.. turns out most of them were much older then my target audience (gamers) and were just internet marketers, so I unfollowed most of them.
So I guess a lil guilty of not being picky enough in the beginning, I tend to be a lot more fickle with company twitterers tho. I’ll follow StarBucks for a bit, but they get bored of their updates and unfollow etc etc…
I am guilty of being very anti-republican tho, but I’m not afraid show it and really only want Liberal followers anyways
Also I’m very open about and being know for the far Left guy politically in my blog community. Guess that is part of my online persona, which reflects my true RL persona as well.
What I’m doing now is being much more selective about who I choose to follow, to avoid needing to unfollow them in the future.
@MeredithGould@twitter.com
I follow that girl who seems to have the inside scoop on Grey’s Anatomy because she has other things to report.
A few months into Twitter and I’m no longer concerned by unfollows. I’m also a lot more discerning about who I follow in the first place…no matter what Mr. Tweet says about my follow back generosity!
@hectorhenry17
Good thank you for your consul its great, of course sometime we louse the perceptive of things that whit we louse followers, the principal base to don’t louse is don’t do what you don’t want other to do you.
@anthroscience
@MeredithGould, Wow is there really a girl with inside Grey’s Anatomy info? My wife would love that! Anyway that’s good that you recognize a given tweeter can have good info in more than one area. Sounds like you are not a fickle follower. Also good that you’re not worried about unfollows. We all get ‘em.
@starfeeder
Hmm tho I do have a political twitter id, I think I will start being more selective about which account to use
@LoneWolfMuskoka
Oh no! I guess my chosen user name was a mistake 8=)
At least I’m not a fickle follower. I find it hard to keep up with it all due to technical (dial up access) and time constraints, but I like to engage in conversations on Twitter. Have to be careful not to get caught up in trying to read every tweet though. That’s hard for me.
One piece of advice I have is don’t worry about people who don’t follow you. They either didn’t really want to follow you in the first place or were just testing out whether you’d be interesting or not. I know that I’m not everybody’s cup of tea and there are people that I will unfollow over time because they don’t add value to my Twitter experience.
Shalom
LoneWolf
@anthroscience
@Will R, I certainly agree that unfollowing can many times be necessary. Sounds like the guy you unfollowed was having impulsive tweeter problems when it came to the weather. I only mean to say that it’s better to be selective about who gets the unfollow because sometimes keeping somebody on the list can be advantageous. I’m sure you agree.
@Lipton, sounds like you have the right idea! If being a lefty has come to be part of your niche then own it! It’s when your impulses are entirely outside what your followers have come to expect that it becomes a problem.
@Orna Ross, those are some great points! I especially like the bit at the end of your comment about building the strength rather than size of your network. Sounds like we are all about the same thing. (Though it is cool to have lots of followers!)