by Glenn Murray of copywriting studio, Divine Write. Follow him @divinewrite.
I must have Twitter all wrong. I follow people because I want to hear what they have to say. Not just what they @reply specifically to me. I like to read every tweet in my Twitterstream. This imposes a practical limit on the number of people I can follow. If I follow more than about 100, I simply can’t keep up. Even at 100, it’s all but impossible.
But I seem to be in the minority here. Most people I see on Twitter follow more than 100 people. Many follow several hundred people, if not thousands. There’s no way they could be reading every single tweet in their Twitterstream. (I’ve spoken to a few people on Twitter about this, and none who are following thousands claim to read everything.)
This raises three very interesting questions:
1) Why do they follow so many people in the first place?
2) Why don’t they unfollow those whose tweets they’re not interested in?
3) What does it matter?
Why follow thousands of people to begin with?
As far as I can tell, there are just six possible reasons:
1) They follow people who look interesting, fully intending to read their tweets;
2) They return all (or most) of the follows they get, simply out of courtesy or because they think that’s just what you do;
3) They return follows because they don’t want to be unfollowed for not reciprocating;
4) They follow people simply to encourage return follows, thereby building their own follow count;
5) They follow people simply to encourage return follows, thereby broadening their scope for DM spam; or
6) They don’t pay much attention to Twitter, so they’re not really sure of their own preferences or of the impact of over-following.
Why not unfollow those whose tweets you’re not interested in?
I can see 5 possible reasons why people don’t cull their Following count:
1) They’re don’t care if they can’t hear what everyone says, so following thousands of people causes no problems;
2) They don’t want to appear rude or don’t want to upset people;
3) They don’t want to be accused of trying to artificially build their follow count (i.e. planning to unfollow as soon as they’d attracted attention and – they hope – a return follow);
4) They don’t have time to figure out exactly who they should unfollow; or
5) They don’t want to lose followers (if the people they unfollow subsequently return the favour).
Why does it matter?
Obviously, how people handle their own Twitterstream is their business. But I think the popular approach to following is going to cause people some problems down the track. In fact, I think it already is…
Already, many people consider the Follower:Following ratio when deciding whether they should follow someone. If you’re following more people than are following you, people begin to wonder why. If, on the other hand, you’re following only a handful of people, and thousands are following you, people will take that as a good sign (if only one sign) that you’re worth following. You obviously haven’t relied on the ‘reciprocation game’ to amass followers.
What’s more, people with a high Follower:Following ratio are more likely to read the tweets of the people they’re following. This makes them a more attractive follow. If they do happen to follow you after you follow them, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll listen to what you say, follow your links and retweet.
But I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think we’re going to see a rush of Twitter apps – and possibly functionalities – that revolve around the Follower:Following ratio. E.g. TweetDeck will soon allow you to sort by this ratio, showing tweets from those with a high ratio at the top. It will even allow you to filter by ratio. Twitter searches will be ordered in a similar way and Twitterati lists (of popular Twitterers) will be ranked by ratio instead of purely by follow count. Twitter, itself, may even start assigning privileges to those with a high ratio. And let’s not forget advertising. Sooner or later someone’s going to figure out how to directly monetise influential Twitter accounts, and the clever owners of those accounts will be laughing all the way to the bank.
What can you do about it?
- Stop following so many people. You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you. Guy Kawasaki may say you do, but he’s a self-confessed Twitter spammer! People don’t expect you to return their follow.
- If someone’s tweeting stuff you’re not interested in, unfollow them. It’s not personal, and there’s no reason you can’t continue to have a great Twitter relationship with them. I have @reply conversations with quite a few people I’m not following. E.g. @golgy, @l0gic and @kielymedia. And – perhaps counter-intuitively – I initiate many of those conversations. They’re great people, but I can only read so much in my general Twitterstream. (Truth is, I have a better relationship with these people than I do with MOST of the people I actually follow. E.g. I follow @aaronwall, @randfish and @charleneli, but they don’t even know I exist. And I have no idea who’s behind @google!)
- Don’t be scared of being accused of anything. So long as your motives ARE above board, people will understand if you unfollow them. People unfollow me every day, and I say GREAT! I want engaged followers – people who’ll read, retweet & respond to my tweets, people who’ll follow my links, people who’ll take the time to comment on my blog and offer feedback and constructive criticism. If someone’s not interested in what I’m tweeting, they’re never going to do any of these things.
- Identify inactive friends (those who haven’t tweeted for a long while) using Twitoria http://twitoria.com/. Then scroll down your Twitterstream and unfollow anyone who’s photo you don’t immediately recognise. Then scroll down again and consider unfollowing anyone who has tweeted something uninteresting. (By “consider”, I mean visit their profile and if their last 30 tweets, or so, are uninteresting, unfollow them.) Then do that again. And again. I guarantee you won’t miss their tweets for a second. Remember, chance are that if they tweet something important, you’ll see it retweeted anyway.
- If someone confronts you about unfollowing them, just say what I’ve had to say in the past: “It’s nothing personal. I like to read every tweet I receive, so I can only follow a small handful of people who are very relevant to my business.” I still have @reply conversations with the people who’ve confronted me.
What do you think?
Please tell me. Am I wrong? Are there other reasons people follow so liberally? And does it really matter? Any other tips around unfollowing? Please comment…
@farrhad
Very well written post!
I think i should unfollow people whose tweets do not interest me.
So we should become Twitter snobs? Stop telling us how to use Twitter!
@PhilBaumann
Glenn,
I agree and disagree with what you’re saying here.
There’s such thing as one standard on how to use Twitter. How I use Twitter might be completely different from you or anyone else.
I know how to follow thousands of people because I value the collective stream of information (or misinformation
that Twitter’s community delivers. Of course I don’t read every single tweet, but I do pay attention when I’m on Twitter and I do interact with followers – even those who I may not have a categorical shared-interest.
When I look at a potential follower I’m fully cognizant of the fact that they’re human. From a certain perspective – for me at least – Twitter is a sort of Social RSS, which just one reason I don’t mind following tons of good peeps.
Not all of us are using Twitter to feed our Inner Narcissist. Some of us – believe it or not – truly enjoy the diverse array of experience which Twitter currently can offer. How any of us participate in this media is ultimately up to us, not a list of rules.
Still: you’ve done a great job of offering high quality advice to many of us.
@sandierpastures
Very thought provoking post. I admit, I follow tweeps who follow me out of courtesy and had to unfollow later because I can’t keep up. I like to read each tweet I see on my screen so I try to tailor the number of people I follow to a minimum. Nothing personal.
@rookie_blogger
If everybody think so no one follow each other and we only can read what we are written.
Sorry for my english but this its not the Theme behind Twitter.
Regards
Thomas
Funny the timing of this article cuz just a few days ago I cleaned up my “following” list. I couldn’t keep up and I wasn’t having any fun. I went from following over 400 down to 27. Now I can keep up with what I really want! Twitter is fun again.
@UltimateWines
I agree completely. Although I’m following a few people who I probably need to unfollow (not because I don’t “like” them but because I am seldom interested in their tweets), I try to only follow people who seem interesting to me and whose tweets are interesting. It’s a real dilemma because I do like to read all of the tweets of people I follow and it does become burdensome (contrary to popular belief, I do have a life outside of Twitter). I just installed TweetDeck which may help me manage the Tweets but I need a little housekeeping first.
@stephauteri
I’m with you, Glenn. Once I hit the 100 following mark, I start to have exponentially more trouble keeping up with tweets. Definitely not conducive to the conversations I find so integral to the Twitter experience. I continuously “clean out” my feed, by unfollowing those whose tweets are consistently irrelevant to the conversation I’m choosing to have on Twitter, and also unfollow those I feel unfamiliar with (it means we haven’t sufficiently been engaging each other).
Of course, then there’s the guilt. Shouldn’t I be following everyone who follows me? What will someone think once I unfollow them? Will they be insulted?
Completely irrational. After all, I don’t take my unfollows personally. I only interpret them as a sign that I wasn’t delivering the content they wanted or needed. And you can’t please everyone.
Wow Chris, I don’t see Glenn’s post written as a direct order from some pseudo Twitter god… it’s called having an opinion and sharing it. Doesn’t mean he’s ordering you. If you disagree, that’s fine… but rather than being snarky here, why don’t YOU submit a well-written, thought out, polite guest post that explains such difference of opinion? You can do that right here, whenever your heart desires: Write for TwiTip.
@angrylush
My rule is the same as all those twelve step groups. I read as many as I can, take in what I can use, and leave the rest behind. I unfollow anyone who consistently tweets with no real agenda or entertainment value.
@tannerk
It’s cult like mentality… So, should you follow 1000’s of users? Sure, just read this article first http://www.twitip.com/how-to-follow-alot-of-people-on-twitter-and-still-be-engaging-using-tweetdeck/
@johnhood
I agree with Glenn! And reply, as often as possible, to anyone I’m not following!
@Jon_Aston
Interesting, but I’m still waiting for the punchline. Why will this cost me $ ?
@susan_m_steele
I guess I’m in the minority, but I’ve never felt guilt about not automatically following those who follow me. A few months ago I tweeted about a local hospital that was pioneering the use of Twitter during surgery; I just thought it was an interesting use of the medium. A few minutes later, the hospital was following me. Why should I follow it? I have no personal interest in this particular institution and it doesn’t fit my interests.
I’ve got plenty of people like that who are following me that I’m not following. And I’m sure I’m following plenty of people who aren’t following me. That seems to matter only if numbers are your goal. My goal is to listen to and learn from interesting people who know things I don’t and share them.
@velvetescape
I’m glad someone is speaking up! I asked a similar question on Twitter a week or two ago: should want want/need to have 1,000’s of followers? Sadly, no one replied…maybe they were all too busy reading their thousands of tweets
I like to read all my tweets and with 80-odd followers, I’m already finding it difficult to keep up. I un-followed a prominent Twitterer two weeks ago, even though we were messaging back and forth, because his hundred+ tweets a day were just clogging up my twitterstream. My policy is to be selective. I only follow those with tweets that interest me. When someone chooses to follow me, I send them a thank you and check out their page, and follow them back if they have something I find interesting. I also look at the number of tweets they post – I think twice about following someone who tweets every minute of the day. If their tweets are interesting, I often return to their page to see what’s new.
@conniereece
I wrote on this topic last week, including the results of a twtpoll I did about what people’s expectations are about following someone back. Only a small percentage said they would unfollow if that action was not reciprocated. Most said it either wasn’t a consideration or that they were fine without a followback as long as their @ messages got a response.
While I haven’t tried to read all tweets for a long time (even when I was following a much smaller number), I do not want to slight the relationships I’ve already built on Twitter. That’s why I have never followed back all the people who add me. My threshhold is much greater than 100, but in no way approaches the 6,000+ people who follow me on Twitter.
I do try to add some new people, because I realize I may be missing insights from very interesting, diverse people. It’s difficult to make that assessment on the basis of a few tweets, so I agree that regular maintenance of your following list is important. Cut out the ones you’ve never interacted with and make room to discover some new people.
You’re right. There is no one way to use Twitter. You’ve found what works for you. How we use a network like Twitter is an individual choice and depends on our reasons for being there.
@onlineravi
Really tweeting takes a lot of time but sometimes is interesting as well
@meredithgould
How affirming to read your post the morning after I culled my follow list and removed nearly 50 people for many of the reasons you cite above. This is a fast-moving medium and over the past 6 months I’ve had an opportunity to refine my understanding of why, when, and how to use Twitter.
Fortunately, I’ve worked in environments where I’ve had to know the names and faces of hundreds of people at a time, at least well enough to register a quick profile in my mind. As a result, I find I can comfortably follow a few hundred folks, especially if some percentage of those follows are organizations, news streams, etc.
I’ve come to value the connections I’ve made on Twitter both personally and professionally, loving how they (and the medium) invite me to grow and change over time. Thanks for your thoughtful post.
@netvalar
You know I don’t care if someone follows me or not I can always @ them and converse. I think at this time though not enough people understand the power of this @ ability or paying attention to their @ stream.
The way I see it even if I don’t follow someone in my personal timestream I am really following the world. I use RSS to pay attention to several search variables through the twitter search function. This way if someone is talking about a subject that I am interested in I can @ them and maybe start a conversation and neither of us need to follow each other. For intense conversations I will follow them for the duration of the conversation and then unfollow after wards unless I feel that their tweets outside of our conversation is worth following regularly.
@zudfunck
This is probably the most intriguing facet to twitter
the rationale or beliefs around the RATIO
Who is right
What is right
I love @ev views on this
he calls them twitter Nazi’s
to him, there are no rules
I like that slant
Great post
ZuD
@carlosphelps
I am fairly new to twitter, but I do think you are right… many twitters are lazy, clueless, or spammers. I have starting using TwerpScan and find it very useful.
@barefootbadger
Nice post. I’m a fairly recent Twitterer, and following simply for following’s sake makes no sense to me. Moreover, high follow numbers prompt many people to post more frequently in order to be seen by their followers…further increasing the load of Tweets a person has to sift through (and decreasing the quality of these tweets). I go for quality over quantity myself.
@bendtheweb
Look at @ev and others who exemplify the opposite of Guy Kawasaki. He has under 100 people he follows I believe – or some extraordinarily low number. The people who most whine about following everyone back are the people who want more followers. They know that following people returns a certain number of autofollows back and that’s how they’ve decided to build their following.
To me, this is untargeted follower building. Getting followers for the sake of it isn’t doing anyone any good substantively.
On the other hand, when you follow more than 100 people, as I do, you must adopt a Zen approach to “keeping up.” In the simplest sense, you cannot. But I don’t believe that’s the way to use Twitter for a lot of people like me. I just check it when I want, catch what’s in the stream at the time, and walk away.
I’ve found more good stuff having a larger follow list than having a 100 or lower limit. I know this because I tried the 100 and lower thing and got BORED!
You can follow more people and get more out of it than fewer people if you stop thinking the goal is to “keep up” with everyone you follow. I’d wager it’s impossible even at 100 to really keep up with every single person.
Twitter, with something like TweetDeck, is MUCH more powerful when you have a good stream of people to follow – and that, for me, is following well over 100 people so that when I check in, there’s always something to see and check out.
@quired
I personally can’t see how anyone could have the time to read every tweet much less the ones of interest even if they are only following only 50.
It is impossible for every tidbit of information from one follower to be interesting to me. I really don’t care about the taxi ride to the airport but that is just me.
It’s all about the collective pool of information that I scan in my feeds. I have actually been using the search function more and more recently to target my scanning but I do lose the immediacy of the post.
But again I don’t place too much relevance on what is going on “this very minute”.
There still is the chatter problem I see with Twitter whether you are following 10 or 10,000.
I think possibly the idea of sharing such small facts of one’s life might end up being a fad, although I do feel twitter has many more uses though and do enjoy the platform.
And yes this is only my opinion and I do respect the opinion of the author of this post.
@NameSugar
I could not disagree more.
The more people you follow the more information you receive. Much is mundane, but sometimes that is valuable also. Many tweeters that post 75%+ mundane stuff occasionally have something brilliant or invaluable to share (like the guy that posted the Twitpic of the plane crash on the Hudson.)
If you can’t follow everything in your tweetstream…congratulations, you’re a human being. Don’t try, you can’t. To even attempt it you would have to limit the number of people you’re following to an absurdly small number. I doubt you would find that interesting.
Once you follow more than 200 people or so you’ll need to manage (not trim, manage) who you follow. For now, the best way to do this is with TweetDeck. It lets you create groups so you can follow multiple narratives easier.
I cringe every time I see someone say “I have to unfollow people so I can understand what’s going on” … that’s like saying “I can only watch one channel at a time so I’ll pick my favorite one”. Do you do that? No, you get a channel guide.
@rahsheen
Hey, Glen. You make some good points and I’ll definitely be unfollowing more. I think I fall into the “don’t have time” category. Which actually means I haven’t bothered. Dealing with follows is a tedious process.
One thing I don’t agree with is unfollowing based on avatars. Some people change avatars like they change underwear. They aren’t as worried about brand-recognition as many of us, but their tweets are still solid.
@theTVaholic
I think you can do whatever works for you, but find the idea of following lots of people not only daunting, but not useful. If I’m following 500 people on Twitter, I would be able to follow very little of what they are posting. If I have someone following me that is also following 500 people, it is very unlikely that they will see what I posted. If everyone is following 500 people, then everyone is seeing very little of what is being posted. To me that seems like a waste for everyone. It makes more sense to me to follow a reasonable number of people that you find interesting and respond to every follower that @s you.
@JeremyVoh
I agree and disagree. It’s obvious that a lot of people will follow a lot of people for the sake of getting a lot of followers and they have no intention of really reading what the people they follow say. It’s a shame, but I guess if people view Twitter as a popularity contest and feel they need to have a big number of followers, that’s their choice, even though I don’t subscribe to that method.
But on the other hand, I think the rules have changed somewhat with the advent of great applications such as TweetDeck. This makes following a few hundred people relatively easy compared to just viewing a single stream of tweets.
Groups make this easy right off the bat. I follow different types of people for different reasons, so I simply create a few groups and assign everyone to their respective group. This way I can scan everything my followers say by looking at one group at a time. It makes it much easier to sort through the time line when you’re focusing on one subset of people.
In addition, TweetDeck has a great filter option. One click of the filter button on my main time line or any of my groups and I can type in “http://” or “investing” or any other keyword to instantly pull up tweets with links or topics that I’m interested in.
That’s just my opinion. I’m still fairly selective in who I follow and don’t follow just anyone who happens to follow me, but at the same time, I’ve started to see my list of people I follow grow past what I was initially comfortable with (which was around 100 or less as the article mentioned). With the help of tools such as TweetDeck I find I can follow more people while still keeping up with almost everything everyone says without getting overwhelmed. Sure, it might not scale and work with following thousands, but it certainly increases the number one can reasonably follow without any application at all.
@GimmeADream
I think this must be why people re-tweet the same message so many times. I started over following around the 40ish mark. I usually only respond to the first page of tweets, though sometimes I’ll go back and read. Personally, I only tweet once but I think I’ll re-tweet the same message more often, particularly if I consider it an important point, to my business.
Wynn
@mygeekdaddy
Great article. I’ve looked at people who have 100’s or 1000’s of followers and wonder how they manage to keep up with the stream. At some point it no longer is a two way communication but a one way shout out mechanism. I’ve been on Twitter for over a year now and I bet for every 5 new followers I get, I’ll end up dropping 4. Now that’s my use of Twitter. Others are using Twitter to build a brand, or image, as a jumping point once someone figures out how to make money off of having thousands of followers. Great, if that’s what you want to do then more power to you. Just keep your tweets interesting and the rest of us will make sure we continue to follow you.
@ParnaSarkar
I believe it’s a personal decision on how you use Twitter and who you follow. However, I follow only a select number of people. Can’t imagine following hundreds of people and trying to read their posts and comments every day. If I want to see tweets on a certain topic, I can always “Search” and catch up.
That’s my two cents.
@cathrynmarie
I’ve been telling people this forever! They laugh @ me because I used to say I dnt wnt more than 300 followers and vise versa – been on since last July and I’ve done pretty well with maintaining such. Of course more personal friends are joining so I’m just a tad over 300 but about 290 follow me – right now. I give them a few days to speak and then I remove them. Keep in mind that this is coming from a twitterer who has over 38,700 updates – probably the most on twitter. I have so many because I am able to actually see what everyone is talking about, get to know them and browse their sites. Which allows me to engage in more familiar convo w/ them. Its about quaility w/ me – who needs 1000 followers if you’re not a celeb?
@CheyanneBrae
Great read Glenn….do enjoy your writing style very much and your topic here has raised a few questions for me to ponder. I follow back out of courtesy, and unfollow as soon as a follower posts/dm’s on topics I
1) don’t have any time for
2) have a strong opposing opinion or
3)dm me with useless sales pitches
Tweetdeck houses my “Mates” column of which there are only approx 50 people. These peoples tweets are continually interesting & informative and I seriously don’t care if they follow me back, I just digg what they have to share. You are one of these tweeple, we @ reply to each other occasionaly, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that you don’t follow me
I talk about so many differing topics, I’m suprised more tweeps don’t unfollow me.
My following column is like a rainbow of people chatting about random topics i’m interested in, on any given day I could like purple and chat with them, another day I may enjoy green and chat to them.
So now I am now pondering the changes that you mention above and how I am going to adapt my following ways. I’ve had more than 140 characters to go wild with & you will probably be checking my 3rd grade spelling mistakes because I can’t spell for crap!
Tweet you soon
@cre8tivkj
I am torn on this post. I am torn because I have found new people to network with I wouldn’t have found the “old way” (i.e. via google search) prior to using twitter and am happy I didn’t stay with my original intended use of twitter (niche based). When I go looking for people to follow on twitter, however, it turns me off when follow/following ratios are off balance. Is it just me? Maybe. I try to keep my following and followers list pretty close to equal because of this. I don’t read each and every tweet but randomly read tweets. I know the twitter names of those I want to read religously and know how to get to their tweets.
I initially came to twitter to network with a totally different niche of people. Your suggested use of twitter would allow you to build a follow and following list to become highly niche based. I believe it is a suggested use, I understand that and don’t think you are trying to tell anyone how to use twitter. If I would have stuck with my initial niche and not broadened my network base by giving almost everyone that follows me a chance, I wouldn’t have found a lot of interesting people. I have more than one interest too, as do most people. I like that aspect of twitter, I can network with all of my areas of interest, not just my niche. Multiple accounts, if very niche based, would become difficult to handle for me. My account may be all over the place and it may be bad for SEO and blah, blah, blah, but my account is all about what works for me, right?
I definately agree with unfollowing people if there isn’t anything interesting there. I also do not follow everyone that follows me, I check out each and every person who follows me. If they do not have anything in their twitter stream I am even remotely interested in, I don’t follow them. I periodically check on people I am not following, though, to see if they’ve said anything interesting to me lately.
Ok, I am done straddling the virtual twitter fence.
@summertomato
Interesting. I have been thinking about this a lot lately.
Generally I find there is no harm in following someone back. If they annoy me after awhile I unfollow. What I don’t like is when they unfollow me back, then follow me again a week or two later. I think this is spam and really obnoxious.
It may be a little more work to follow then filter later (if you are sincerely engaged in Twitter, this is not so hard), but I have met wonderful people this way that I would probably not have encountered without the extra effort. Isn’t that what Twitter is for?
On the other hand, I think it is pretty douchy for people to follow only to inflate their numbers. These people seem more and more common–they have tens of thousands of followers but are always following 2,000 more people than are following them back. I would love to see them somehow punished for their spammy behavior. Poetic justice
interesting. and a helpful way of gaining power force twitter black belt status.
@c0deworks
I can see the logic in this. I follow a lot of people for a simple reason – I do not use Twitter on any form of mobile device, or from anywhere except home. I don’t read all tweets, but, I do like coming back to my keyboard to find something interesting to read.
Now, the more people I follow, the more stuff I’ll find to read, surely?
Still, you should try and keep it limited to people that post things that you are interested in.
@andreasnrb
There is a increasing number of people who use programs to automatically follow people and then unfollow within a few days if they dont get a follow back. Its fun to see the roller coaster behaviour this creates on your follower nbrs. The ones that does this have always a 1:1 ratio or close. But another behavior is also popular so you don’t get 1:1. You just unfollow after a week or two after you got your follow back.
So given this automatic boosting of “importance” I think the ratio in conjunction with some history data will get a more prominent place when it comes to how you value/rank a twitter user.
I can’t agree more with what Glenn writes. I personally only follow people who post stuff that may be of interest to me. For keeping up with overall topics I just use Search in TweetDeck .
@ddchefmom
I totally agree! I have not known exactly what was PC in this situation in twitter, but it makes sense. I have been unfollowing people who flood my stream or bore me. Like you say- nothing personal. I only have so much time to spend reading tweets, after all. Thank you for clarifying!
@tomasinho
Great post, I agree totally and today I unfollowed some 20% of my followers!
I wrote today about Twitter’s road to ruin because the majority of people are blindly attempting to gather thousands of followers. This is detrimental to the quality of Twitter and instills bad habits imposed by follower/following reciprocation.
What you see is the appearance of super-hubs, macro-hubs, and local-hubs. Each fine in their own context, but not when bots attempt to recreat them by auto accepting new friends.
See my post @ http://econominted.com/index.php/2009/03/twittersphere-hubs-and-race-to-ruin/ for more insights
@sijt
I think services like twitoria sit in an odd position. While I can see the benefit of unfollowing those who do not post regularly (it makes your following list easier to manage for one), doing so is hardly likely to help you deal with the stream of tweets coming your way. After all, they don’t post very regularly so wouldn’t be in your feed anyway.
@onlinedatingpro
I have two twitter accounts – one for my blog, Geek’s Dream Girl and one for my business, Online Dating Profiler. The two overlap a bit since GDG covers topics of geek love and online dating.
For my business, I run a contest every Monday where I give away a free online dating profile critique or 30 minute dating coaching session. In order to win, the person must be the 10th DM (think radio station 10th caller!). For this to work, I have to return the follow. There are some people I follow on ODP that don’t follow me (yet, so those numbers are 213 following / 189 followers.
For GDG, I only follow people who are either a) my close friend or b) someone I can learn from. I’m very good at responding to @ replies, so interact with the rest of the Twitterverse that way. No one has complained about my lack of following. GDG is 131 following / 363 followers.
Twitter is what you make of it. My two accounts serve totally different purposes and both do what they do pretty darn well. I’m happy.
@cdn
I guess we all use twitter differently, because we all look for different things. Some go for quantity, others for quality. I’m inclined to believe that I’m going for the latter, which has implications both for the people I follow, and for those following me…
I actually know the majority of people following me: I have probably met them, or we are already LinkedIn or otherwise connected for a while, or we have engaged in valuable conversation on twitter, and eventually I decided to follow them… Some people I follow for who they are — family, friends, (former) colleagues, etc. — and others for what they tweet. I somehow imagine that the people following me have the same approach, but looking at them I know that isn’t true. Actually, I’m puzzled as to a considerable part of my following. Nevertheless, I feel that I have a responsibility of quality towards my following, also. Difficult if not impossible, given that they are hundreds and all looking for something different, possibly.
A minor point regarding your suggestion to identify (and eventually unfollow) inactive friends: Why would I? It’s not the inactive followers that are disturbing/noisy, it’s the overactive ones! And some will get a warning message (please don’t spam) and if their behavior doesn’t change I will unfollow…
@cdn
@macstian
Always, since I started using Twitter three weeks ago, it´s been my attention to follow people that interest or inspire me. Just because thats the value the community can give me. For this reason I will unfollow – hope none take this as an action of “war”.
To be lost in twitterspace doesn´t seem to interesting to me. Also when I´m in a complete different timezone (Scandinavia) than most of the twitters out there I would for shure have difficulties getting their attention real-time. If they then have a 1000 following I would for shure be lost in translation…
But why one would unfollow inactive friends, as proposed, I´m not shure of… They´re not cluttering up the space, and since there´s a good reason in the firstplace that I chose to follow them, then maybe that ONE time they choose to twitter it could very well be just the info that I wanted!
On a note: those in my following I´m first to unfollow would be those who overclutter my feed with more or less interesting tweets. I´ll see them as too timeconsuming (meaning not my cup of tea).
Thank you very much for giving your “other” thoughts on this Glenn.
@jennifersacto
Hmm, this really made me think. My @jennifersacto account is aimed at helping my work understand the power of social media. So, I follow people that are local to me, or that tweet about recruiting & career issues and some about social media/marketing. I don’t try to read everything in my stream. I have, at most, 1-2 hours most days I can look at it. I look at what’s “live” when I log on, and go back a couple of hours and look at that.
People that are following me are not all the people I follow and vice versa, and that’s ok with me. For this account.
@vlb
First, as many before me have said, everyone is different. You may not be able to follow more than 100 but that’s you, not a general rule of reality. You have your way of using Twitter; I have my way; Robert Scoble has his way. None are wrong.
I’m currently following 350 people. And yes, much of the time I really do read everything. Sometimes I miss a day. How do I do it?
1) They don’t all tweet all the time. They don’t even all tweet every day.
2) I have my settings configured for the (default) “See replies if I follow both people”. I don’t see halves of conversations.
3) My Twitter Reader captures my incoming stream 24/7. I read when I have time.
4) When I do read, I scan. If a tweet looks interesting I read it. If not, I don’t. Just because I think the person is interesting enough to follow doesn’t mean I have to read everything they say. (e.g. Some people like baseball; I don’t)
4) I do not feel that I have to be reading Twitter in Real Time.
5) I do not feel that I have to reply to everyone.
Finally, if I miss a day? It does not matter.
That’s how I do it. That’s not how you (or he or she) has to to it.
@GirlfriendCeleb
I’m one of those with good intentions – I regularly add people whose tweets look interesting, and sometimes I do add people out of courtesy, as a followback, especially if they are newbies. However, I’m getting more selective on who I follow, because of the sheer number of tweets. I do make an effort to read as many tweets as I can. I’ve stopped return followign people who I suspect are just following me to get a follow back and thus build their own follower count. My tweets are geared to a couple of specific audiences, so it’s fairly obvious if someone is following me because they’re interested or just trolling for followers. It’s worth mentioning that if you don’t follow someone, they cannot DM you, and you never know what opportunities you might be missing.
@marcusfriedman
Glenn, I totally agree with you, and as someone who has been using Twitter for just a few months, it is reassuring to read that following a large number of people isn’t wise.
I like to read every tweet from the people I follow, and so I have to focus on the users whose tweets are really relevant to me. I don’t see the point in following hundreds “just in case” (even when, as it has been pointed out, there are tools like TweetDeck that can help you with that).
I think that you can keep the users you follow to a low number (100 seems more than reasonable) without having to sacrifice the diversity that can lead to richer or better perspectives.
@TysonFoods
It’s clear by the comments here–thoughtful from many perspectives–that there are many “right” approaches to Twitter use.
You can listen to all of the people some of the time. Or some of the people all of the time.
Or put another way, do you want to be in a large room, with many conversations into which you circulate; or a smaller room with a more intimate conversation?
For me, it’s about opening the communications channel. I might not catch every @ConnieReece tweet (even though they’re all valuable:-), but by following her, I know I’ll see some of them. And because she follows me, I know I can dm her when the conversation needs to flow that way.
I came to this very interesting discussion through a “looser” Twitter connection.
@Sukee
I am currently following just over 80 people. I don’t just follow people who follow me. I only follow those who I’m interested in hearing about. I will not follow a Twitter who is only on there to market their latest product.
@Bauart
Your reasoning is very two dimensional. It appears you use Twitter like others use Facebook, i.e. to keep up with your friends.
I use Twitter for a much broader purpose, to crowd source trends and information and as a way to increase my site traffic and my industry influence. In my case, and like others who use Twitter this way, more followers is better.
To your point about information saturation…. I use applications like Tweetdeck to filter my followers into bite sized groups. i.e. Designer friends, business colleagues, family, celebrities, etc… This way I can just glance at each group and see what’s important. I can then also search groups for trends and points of interest.
Twitter is aspirational, unlike Facebook. You can reach out to whomever you like and beyond your regular network. If you just use Twitter for your close friends that is perfectly fine, but there is MUCH to it than that.
@aaronelliott
I totally agree. I can’t possibly follow everyone that wants to follow me. I’m a fairly new user, so I’m getting a lot of if-I-follow-you-will-you-follow-me follows. I like that they’re following me, but looking at their follow ratio, there’s no way they’re interested in paying attention to what I have to say. Especially since I’ve only made about 5 updates since I joined.
My philosophy so far: I only follow people that I believe can add value to my life and in return, I’ll try to add some value to those that follow me.
@Factor77
I don’t mind following lots of people, making lots of friends and being polite, because I can filter all my stuff in groups and searches with Tweetdeck!
I always hear what I want to hear b/c I sort it accordingly!
@riscario
Thoughtful article and comments. As a newbie, I’m trying to figure out how to use Twitter properly/i>. As others have pointed out, there’s no “right way”.
I started following the people who follow me (how they find me remains a mystery). This didn’t work well. Some tweet too much or on topics that don’t interest me. I now unfollow them. This doesn’t appear to cause offense (and none is intended).
I’m still amazed to see people following thousands of others. I can’t afford to pay that much attention. Maybe speed reading would help
@dcrmom
Interesting conversation. I’ve recently started following more people b/c I felt badly that I had exponentially more followers than those I followed. But I haven’t been as active in the Twitterstream b/c there are so many tweets by people I don’t know and don’t have interest in.
I don’t think I could unfollow half my follows; I’d feel too badly. But I do think it makes sense to carefully follow only those you really know or have interest in knowing.
@digiphile
Interesting post. Unfortunately, I think you missed something extremely important in your assessment: If you don’t follow someone, they can’t DM you. The reciprocal is also true. Many of the most important uses of Twitter — at least for me, working in tech journalism, depend on the ability to ask questions or receive answers non-publicly.
Further, one key element of Twittiquette (for me) is to move conversations that don’t have value for all of my followers into a 1-to-1 interaction. Sometimes a dialogue around a topic in public has use (#townmeeting, #election, #journchat) but I find moving most private is a best practice.
As is nearly often the case, I fully agree with @ConnieReece’s assessment: there’s no one “right way” to approach this. I will say the following, based upon my own experience:
Once you get to the point of following thousands of people, as I do, you will of course not be able to read every tweet. You can, however, dip in and out of the stream. I’ve been doing that for years with hundreds of blogs using an RSS reader. If something is really worth reading, it tends to be shared, RT’ed, delicious’ed, Dugg or otherwise elevated through the collective action of readers.
Just my two cents. YMMV. -Alex
@JoelDrapper
I used to follow everyone back, but just the other day, I decided to unfollow everyone (about 13,000), and then start from scratch, and follow people I actually want to know about. Since then I have enjoyed twitter so much more, as I can actually see the tweets that interest me.
I have lost thousands of followers because of this, but I guess none of these followers were actually interested to hear what I had to say. They probably only followed me because I followed back.
Despite the massive loss of followers since doing this, I still think it’s a great idea. I now only follow about 100, and I recommend everyone following more then a thousand do the same!
Why is it every blogger that uses Twitter has to go and overanalyze everything about the service? Its a small message service, get over it! You bloggers are just trying to draw traffic into your blogs. You dont realize that by doing so, you are making yourself LOOK CHEAP by doing so.
Twitter is NOTHING. It just happens to be popular because of stupid posts like this, the people that use it, and the high school mentality that surrounds it.
(edited for swearing: please keep comments at a family friendly level – you can make your point strongly without the language – Darren)
@kaex88
This post just emphasizes the need for Twitter to add a “group” options. I have a large number of college friends on Twitter who I’d like to separate from the professional folk I follow and my work colleagues and so on. So while I may not read *every* post, it’s easier to track what’s going on amongst the different people.
Sadly, it was Facebook not Twitter that addressed this issue when they added the Friend List option on to their homepage in the new design.
@WendyMerritt
I think using Twitter is like doing your taxes. If you took your taxes to an accountant and then to another 10 accountants you will find different results from each of them. They each have their own philosophy and interpretation of your tax filings (if they weren’t so dang complicated maybe we could do them ourselves…that’s another conversation…). Anywho, Twitter users also have many different interpretations of how it is best used. One person says follow everyone, another says just follower the important ones, another says just follow people you know. I think they are all right answers. Your Twitter paradigm will direct your path.
This article is almost exactly what I just said the other day! I agree. I am almost insulted when someone following 13,853 people follows me. You know there is not way on earth they are going to be able to hear, much less follow, what you are saying. Why bother? SpamTwit!
I didn’t know about http://www.twittoria.com. Thanks for that great link. I wondered how to check who was tweeting and who wasn’t. I was able to shed a few untweeting tweeps.
Joel, I was one of the followers you dropped! I am interested in what you say but I must confess that I took it kind of personally when you unfollowed me…LOL How silly is that? I have kept you on my list as I do enjoy reading your discoveries.
Blessings,
Wendy
@matthewclower
I believe there are many people that do what you describe. It is, however, an unfair assessment and seams very naïve and presumptuous.
For Example:
I follow many people, and those whom I am clearly uninterested in any of their tweets, I do not follow or unfollow. Using tools like #TweetDeck, it is possible to organize and sort through data very simply. This means that I can follow many and use the tools I have available to me, filtering in/out, searching, grouping, etc., to find both tweets I find interesting and those that I am not. There is no way that I could spend all of my time reading each and every tweet that comes into my stream and quite frankly I don’t want to. There are many Twitter users with whom I interact that say things in which I am interested “some of the time” and I organize my groups and routines accordingly. Having many followers whom I trust (for information) also helps me quickly identify trends in news and events. If leveraged properly, it is in my opinion beneficial to be following a larger group of people.
That being said, following for the sake of following is not productive.
@davidkspencer
Another reason to follow “too many people” is the assumption that Twitter’s going to continue to add new ways to derive value from your network.
For example, if when searching on twitter, results from people in my network were valued higher than results from strangers, it would be an incentive to follow people whose information you valued even if you didn’t want to engage with them directly on a frequent basis.
I have to believe that the social web will continue to improve our ability to capitalize on the strength of our networks. So I’d rather build networks which are slightly overwhelming and have to do a bit more heavy lifting to process the information, as opposed to creating tiny networks and being able to digest everything they have to say.
@Radlein
Right now, my follow ratio is about 3:1,and I’m following just under 600 people. That’s just a bit too many to completely follow, but only just a bit, thanks to tools like TweetDeck and Twirl, which are much more efficient than the web UI.
I’ve never automatically followed anyone who followed me first; when I get a follow from someone new, I take some time to figure out why they followed me, by looking at their profile and list of follows/followers. Are they part of one of my Twitter interest groups (webcomics, politics/Daily Kos, SF Fandom, women’s soccer)? Do we have mutual acquaintances? Are they being followed by people I follow? Are they follow-exchange spammers? Do their tweets appear to be coming from an actual human being?
It’s not foolproof, of course: I recently found out that one of my followers whom I hadn’t followed in return was actually a friend of more than twenty years who I didn’t recognize because he had no real information in his profile and he looked a lot different in his picture from the last time I had seen him. Kind of ironic, given that he’s one of only three or four people in my whole Twitterverse whom I actually know in real life.
Also, when calculating whether to follow someone, their usage patterns play a role: Someone who rarely tweets or hasn’t tweeted for months represents a minimal cost to me in terms of attention, so I am actually more likely to follow them; on the other hand, someone who tweets constantly is someone who will take up a large portion of my twitter stream; and unless doing so will cause me to miss out on a lot of continuing conversations with people I do follow, I am less likely to follow them.
@mattjurmann
I agree, there shouldn’t be a standard on how to use Twitter. That being said, I think the author really touched base on a few very important topics. The most important, IMO, is: Why are you following someone? If you’re just following them because they followed you without knowing who they are or what they tweet about, well, it just doesn’t seem to make much sense to me (especially if you’re using an application like TweetDeck and only view tweets from a select number of people you’re filtering through a group).
Really though: you should only be following someone if you’re interested in what they have to say, and vice versa. Otherwise, what’s the point? I only follow friends and people whose opinions I respect. If I don’t know you, I won’t follow you. If you give me a reason to follow you, then I most certainly will.
@lalunablanca
Great post. I agree with many items cited. However, there is no mention of grouping. With grouping, you are able to segment your views by category. This functionality is in:
If it weren’t for grouping, I think more of these points in this post would apply to more people. Possibly grouping will prove to be too complicated for many.
One thing I love (and am annoyed about at times) about Twitter is that it demonstrates the Long Tail in so many ways. Onward.
I’ve elaborated on this with a prediction at my blog at lalunablanca.com .
@brandonacox
Twitter isn’t email – you don’t have to read it all. If your goal is to influence people with a message, following many is a basic requirement. Personally, I use TweetDeck to set up a group of people I follow more closely but I interact with just about everybody. As said before, it all depends on your purpose.
I think in the future, there will always be room for casual users who simply want to connect with some friends. But Twitter will also continue to develop as a powerful search tool for what is relevant, which will be spurred on by users with large follow numbers. We really need both and we need to keep our opinions in check – there is room for everyone at the table.
@Sheamus
It’s very easy to follow large numbers of followers on Twitter using applications like TweetDeck, as Jeremy suggests above. You can setup groups for the people you don’t want to miss a single tweet and by using the filter feature in your ‘all friends’ pane can quickly and easily search for topics of which you are interested in, or use ‘http’ for links or ‘?’ to find and answer questions. Additionally, you can use the minus part of the filter to remove things of no interest.
I agree that you should maintain as best a ratio you can for a number of reasons, but unless you’re still stuck on the very-limiting Twitter.com (or an app that mirrors it) then I think you can follow an enormous amount of people and still full engage with the Twitter stream.
That said nobody can engage with everybody completely. Unless you’re on 24/7 and/or go back and read the entire profiles of all your followers every single day, even 100 would be a struggle. So, assuming you don’t want to pretend to be a celebrity and just follow 12 people, I’d suggest really getting to grips with the features of TweetDeck and following a lot more. Twitter is about socialisation and meeting new people and sharing new ideas. It’s not, in my opinion, an ideal medium for just chatting with mates and/or like-minded people.
And why would anyone want to do that? We don’t just learn from people we like and/or agree with. If you want to be right on that information curve, you have to be following thousands of people – or be a real genius knowing exactly whom you need to be following all the time, just in case something important breaks. It’s no good following a hundred yourself while being followed by thousands. That just screams ‘ego’. Unless you’re famous, it isn’t warranted (and even then it’s highly debatable).
Many very respectable users on Twitter follow thousand of people. @chrisbrogan, @stephenfry, @guardiantech, @scobleizer and, of course, @problogger.
I urge everybody to flip this around and follow more people. Keep your ratio about 1:1, slightly in your favour, but follow people back. Sure, if they’re dull/rude/annoying/mental, drop ‘em like a hot stone, but don’t just not follow people because you can’t keep up. You can; you just need to learn how to do it.
I’m actually planning to do a video tutorial on the most efficient way to use TweetDeck on my blog this week (possibly tomorrow), which will cover this, as well as including tips on reducing API drain, which lots of folk seem to suffer with.
@patweber
This made me think AGAIN of the Dunbar’s number theory: the number of people who you can maintain social relationships where you know each person, and how they each relate to one another. It’s somewhere around 150.
Having said that, I think the number of people you follow is more tied to your intentions of being on Twitter than social relationships.
Loved all and everyone’s thoughts here – thanks for being au contraire.
Blogging Business Sales Tips for Introverts, Shy and Reluctant
@BoomerGuide
An excellent article. I realized right away after signing up with Twitter that I didn’t want to follow everyone who follows me. It would be too time consuming to read all those tweets.
I’m a consumer journalist-blogger for boomer consumers, so I use Twitter to get information on topics that I’m interested in blogging about. I follow Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Organic Consumers Association, FDA Recalls, Food Safety, CDC Emergency, PCC Co-ops, and about a dozen others. It’s a manageable amount.
I have 35 to 40 people who follow me and that’s fine. I read their profiles as they come in and if I think they’ll provide worthwhile consumer information, I follow them.
Recently I received an e-mail about a follower whose Web site showed a person opening Fed-ex packages containing $2,000 to $5,000 in cash. It looked like a chain letter deal of some kind. Strange.
I blog at The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide at http://boomersurvive-thriveguide.typepad.com.
Rita
@JeanneElle
I like the fact that you’ve created a rational, reasonable argument for unfollowing. Many Twitterers take unfollowing pretty personally (as did I in the beginning).
I’m one of those who follow everyone I think seems interesting, with the intention of reading all the tweets, but who seldom has time! lol. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t followed so many, and yet I can’t resist… I keep following new people
@naterkane
Maybe I didn’t see it while reading the post or while skimming the comments, but one point that somehow has managed to get overlooked is Direct Messages, DM’s or D’s for short. By mutually following other users, even users who you have no interest in paying attention to on a daily basis, you have the ability to not only send, but also receive private or non-public messages from more people. Tracking and responding to public @’s can be tedious for some, either due to the popularity of their character, the amount of “free” time they have to spend on twitter, both, or any other number of reasons. So by allowing those who want to specifically address them with a Direct Message to do so, it can make that person’s life-flow (non work-task workflow) quite a bit easier to manage.
I for one try not to use twitter as a public, semi-public, or private messaging platform. I’m not always successful, and do find myself @-replying to people from time to time. FollowCost tells me that it’s 30% of the time, which I can’t decide means I’m using Twitter exactly how I don’t want to, or it means I’m “engaged in the conversation” (a marketing tagline that I’m not incredibly fond of). What it comes down to is this… people sometimes ask me questions that I don’t care to respond to publicly. Having the ability to send that person a direct message on the same platform (i.e. Twitter) vs. googling them, getting their email address/IM screename/etc and responding privately keeps my lifeflow simple, and solves the problem of having to communicate with people in a needlessly public format.
@stinginthetail
i’ve started using Twitter Karma http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ – very neat, easy sorting of who’s following/follower/both – and you can see when they last tweeted.
I’ve only just started using Twitter, but already, i’ve had to stop auto-following people back. As you say, i just don’t have time, and i’m not interested – then i found out one guy who seemed okay was a convicted spammer, lol – using the name he’d been convicted under. So i now look at their Tweets – if all they do is retweet others, or promote themselves, I don’t follow.
@wowwebworks
Thanks for sharing your thoughts – 2 things come to mind.
First is the importance of having a goal for using Twitter. Your business Twitter account may have goal of gaining a huge number of followers by being a ‘thought leader’ on your subject – thus gaining favorable relationships that eventually lead to business returns. In the process you gain feedback and knowledge from your followers.
Second is possibly having personal learning account that is private. Inviting a few select people from one account to the second that you actually use to ‘learn from’ allows you to graze from the best of your followers. You can also post things there that you might not consider for the business account.
This way you can scan the business account for interest plus feed the flock. For education from the best, interact with the personal account.
That’s what I am planning to do very soon as I sure can’t begin to keep up with a few hundred followers. I only allow about 30 minutes of twitter time a day – I have a business to run.
@BlackMediaProp
I do follow most of the people who follow me..but def not all. i use twitter as mostly a marketing tool and honestly I’m not usually on there other then that. Because most of the people I “follow” are friends with me on fbook so that is enough of info from them right there. When it comes to getting info off of Twitter I usually know them by heart so i can go straight to @neilpatel @problogger or @techcrunch to see what their talking about.
@starlightlife
Aloha! I think using twitter is like having an opportunity to go to a large social venue where the people there also want to meet and greet. It can take som time to move from conversation to conversation to find where you may want to hang and another group you may be able to help and influence….being on a small island I am very grateful for twitter and am happy to say I follow a lot of people and a lot of people follow me….people I learn from at a random moment in time and I trust I touch others who don’t need to tell me or even respond, just take the info and run with it….this is the beauty of twitter! Can’t really predict where or when we make a difference so I love the big numbers…I can read what I can when I can and I learn soooo much!
Bottom line tweeple are as diverse as people simply find what makes you tweet!
Aloha~
@alex_poole
Interesting post Glenn, thanks.
I think once you accept the the world is one big information overload – and the best you can do is hope to find the odd nugget in the stream, then “overfollowing” ceases to be an issue.
IMHO I’d rather miss most of the gold in my fairly large stream than try to actually read every post in a small one.
For close friends and contacts I have an email address, and a phone
@greeblemonkey
I do agree with a lot of what was said – for example, I do wonder when I see people who follow vastly more people than they have following them… However, I am not sure I would go as far as saying people should unfollow just to get their ratios better… as for me – I do try to keep the number of people follow down to the bare minimum just because I am not looking for Twitter to market anything, I am looking for relationships – and I simply *cannot* keep up with all that velocity in my stream. Personally I think the ratio should be about whatever each person is comfortable with. I understand why some bigwigs went through and declared twitter bankruptcy because they were following 60,000 people and simply could not keep up, but I also think to put some magic number on it that works for everyone is a little ludicrous. Every person has different motivations on Twitter, a different mix of people in their stream, and needs to find the balance that works for them.
@maoxian
Thank for hipping me to Twittoria … very handy tool, that.
@dmburrows
Wow, people are passionate about this topic like those “does God exist or not” topics. Like many others said – much better than I can say – earlier, Twitter is flexible and open and each person makes of it, uses it and gains from it what they wish. I don’t care how anyone else uses it myself. There are people who only want their small circle of a dozen college friends and then the Guy Kawaski’s with 50 ghost writers and 100,000 followers. Me? I use it to broaden my business reach, meet new people, entertain myself and any readers who wish to join in and to interact with those I connect with. So far? It has been one of the most enjoyable and beneficial web tools out there.
@untangle
Nice article, G.
I, too, read all my tweets and I’m comfortable following the 80-90 mark. As relationships change so too does the list of people I follow, so I am constantly meeting new people, building sound relationships as I go.
I just don’t gel with the idea of creating groups of peeps who ‘I don’t want to miss their tweets’ and ‘I’ll just skim through and see if they have something interesting to say’. I should be interested in all their tweets; if I’m not, then I shouldn’t be following.
This isn’t to say that this strategy is for everyone! I think the most important thing is to work out why you’re on Twitter, then align the tool to accomplish your goals.
@angie1234p
Not only have readers learned how Glenn handles Twitter, but have gotten a peak at everyone else’s methods and ideas as well.
I generally follow a type of hybrid of ideas. I used to follow everyone who wasn’t an obvious spammer. After a discussion along this same line, I unfollowed the masses and just followed the ones that really and truly interested me. I have to say I’m glad I did.
I can’t limit myself to just 100. I follow just under half, but I also run Twitter searches that let me see what an entire industry or topic is doing. I actively reply to all @ replies and will even follow those who @ reply me back so long as he or she is generally engaging.
Those who I don’t remember, or can’t remember seeing a tweet from, I unfollow after a while. I mean, if I can’t remember anything that person has done for a few months, we likely haven’t engaged each other enough for a follow. Nothing personal. It just is. People unfollow me all the time. It’s nothing personal, and I’m not going to hold it against them. If I find that person interesting, I stick with that person regardless.
Twitter has become a fantastic place. I have improved my relationship with those I do follow because I am better able to follow their tweets (even in TweetDeck, following too many felt overwhelming and almost like a pressure in order to find the good stuff).
I still get to hear what others have to say and don’t feel that I miss out. If someone wants to Dm me, I have no problem following back, or will just provide my email address, which is easier for most anyway.
As many have already said, everyone has their own way of using Twitter. I think it’s great that we all get the opportunity to learn how others use and see the Twitterverse picking up hints and ideas that we would not have thought of before. The mysteries of Twitter revealed.
@divinewrite
Wow! Great comments, guys, thank you!
A point of clarification: Each morning when I come into the office, I scroll to the bottom of my Twitterstream in TweetDeck and read the last 200 tweets I’ve received. After that, for the rest of the day, I read tweets pretty much as they arrive. On weekends, however, I miss a lot of tweets. My wife already thinks I’m Twitter-obsessed! She’d shoot me if I spent time reading tweets on the weekend!
I’d like to respond to a few, if I may:
Everyone who said something nice: thanks for that. Much appreciated!
Everyone who mentioned sorting/filtering with TweetDeck: I use TweetDeck, but isn’t filter/sorting just another way to NOT read certain tweets? Unless TweetDeck offers something in the way of improving my reading speed or increasing the number of hours in the day, I don’t think there’s a tool that’s going to help me with my approach.
Chris Lockwood: Sorry if you felt I was telling you how to use Twitter. Just discussing my observations and expressing my opinion.
Everyone who commented that there’s no rules or standard way to use Twitter: I agree. I just think that certain ways will soon result in negative consequences.
Stephanerd: Love your comment about unfollows: “I don’t take my unfollows personally. I only interpret them as a sign that I wasn’t delivering the content they wanted or needed. And you can’t please everyone.” Couldn’t agree more!
Jack Humphrey: I like your approach: “I just check it when I want, catch what’s in the stream at the time, and walk away.” If I was ever to stop reading EVERY weekday tweet I get in TweetDeck, I think I’d adopt your approach.
Rahsheen: You’re right. Unfollowing people if you don’t recognise their avatar would definitely be a bad idea if you’re following a lot of people. I was thinking from the context of my own small following list; I actually notice when people change their avatar. Hadn’t considered how hard this would be if your following list is big.
Everyone who commented that Twitter is for meeting people: For me, this isn’t, strictly speaking, true. I read tweets to learn, to encounter new ideas, and to stay up to date. Obviously I value the people who deliver those things, and I enjoy communicating with them. But I Twitter while I work, so socialising certainly isn’t my main priority.
Christian DE NEEF: Re your question about unfollowing inactive friends: My answer is related to the Follower:Following ratio. If I’m right, and this ratio starts to play a big part in the way Twitter and associated apps/services work, then following inactive ppl may eventually have negative consequences.
Vicki: I actually approach it much like you. (Except for your second point 4.) I think when we’re talking 140 characters, there’s very little distinction between “reading” and “scanning”. Whatever it’s called, though, I’m pretty much at my limit when following 100.
Wendy Merritt: Great comment: “I am almost insulted when someone following 13,853 people follows me. You know there is not way on earth they are going to be able to hear, much less follow, what you are saying.” While I don’t feel insulted, I do question how closely they’ll follow what I say.
Sheamus: Very thoughtful comment. I don’t agree with this, though: “If you want to be right on that information curve, you have to be following thousands of people”. Twitter’s second-tier network ability is very powerful. I hear a lot through RTs. You may say that this increases the chance I’ll miss things or hear them too late, but considering how easy it is to miss tweets when you follow too many people, I don’t think it puts me at any greater risk. Also, I don’t see that celebs have any better justification for having a high Follower:Following ratio. We’re all busy. Nor do I think it screams ‘ego’. When I see someone with a high ratio, my first thought is that they’re far more likely to hear the things the people they’re following say. Finally, as mentioned in my comment above about TweetDeck, I don’t think it’s a question of “learning to keep up”. I know how to use the tools, but they don’t make me read faster, and they don’t give me any more hours in the day!
@Webtones
I agree with you Glenn but have my limit at 200. Reason being there are so many interesting people to follow & some don’t tweet often so easy to keep on top of. I also try & read every tweet from who I am following every morning & check updates about 3 times during the day. I do unfollow if I find un-interesting & won’t follow those with thousands (except a few eg John Cleese, as he cracks me up). My limit of 200 may increase as it is dictated by interesting people & I endeavour to read all.
@voirol
Glenn,
One possible flaw in your argument is that you always mention *a* tweet stream. Tools like TweetDeck (which it appears you are using) allow you to break up your tweet stream into multiples.
I have a fast-running one with the 400 or so people I follow, a slower-running one with people I’m more interested in and a very slow one with only a handful of close friends. Consequently I read the first one occasionally, the second one most of the time and in the last one I read every tweet.
You also write “If, on the other hand, you’re following only a handful of people, and thousands are following you, people will take that as a good sign (if only one sign) that you’re worth following”. With me, it’s quite the other way round. If someone is followed by a thousands and only follows a handful that means my chances of engaging in a conversation with them is nil as they are unlikely to follow me back. I’m more likely to follow someone who has a roughly equal ratio.
@CraneFactory
I follow 167 people at the moment. I’ll unfollow on two criteria:
- person is always writing stuff that doesn’t interest me (not to say they aren’t interesting to *someone*, just not me)
- person is inactive for several months
I doubt I could manage to follow more than a few hundred, but my technique for managing a busy stream is:
- use Tweetdeck groups so that I can check my “A-List” and “B-List” groups for tweets I missed overnight or after a lengthy absence (eg first thing in the morning)
- only monitor the full stream of people I follow at times when I am in front of the computer
- at times just letting the stream pass me by
@ExpertParalegal
Thanks for the good advice. I am definitely going to apply it.
@divinewrite
Another wow! A whole heap more comments obviously just got approved. Some more responses from me:
Jon Aston (and Joshua Hay): Following too many people will/could cost you dollars in a number of ways: 1) With a low ratio, you’ll get less qualified followers ‘cos you’ll be seen by many as someone who probably won’t read the tweets you receive. If you’re in business, this has a $ cost because networking has a direct impact on sales. 2) If/when twitter and twitter apps/services start focusing more on ratio (instead of absolute follow count), you’ll be ‘rated’ lower. i.e. Your perceived influence will be lower. This will mean you’ll attract fewer followers, and have less chance of being singled out for any direct account monetisation. (Influential people always make money on the side, don’t they?)
Jeremy: Love your analogy: “I cringe every time I see someone say “I have to unfollow people so I can understand what’s going on” … that’s like saying “I can only watch one channel at a time so I’ll pick my favorite one”. Do you do that? No, you get a channel guide.” Doesn’t work for me, but I can see the sense in it. When it comes to Twitter, however, I DO watch only one channel. It’s all I need. And if I stop watching it, I miss stuff.
Karen & Frank: I’m definitely talking about business and about a niche. I can see that people who use it for non-business purposes, or for non niche purposes would find my methods constrictive. The potential $ loss still applies to them, though.
David: Actually, I don’t follow ANY friends on Twitter. I follow my uncle and my sister-in-law, but that’s it. The rest of the people I follow are people I’ve discovered on Twitter who tweet new, original, or otherwise very interesting stuff about copywriting, SEO, social media or Australian digital media issues. This is my business niche. Furthermore, I don’t use Twitter to keep in touch with people. I use it to listen to what people are saying, thinking, reading, attending or debating.
Alexander Howard & Nater Kane: Nice responses! I don’t really have an answer to the DM question. I haven’t *noticed* that this is a problem, but, then again, it’s probably not the sort of thing you’d notice, is it. I suppose I rely on people emailing me if they want to speak with me privately. Or @ replying and asking to talk offline somehow. It’s definitely a trade-off.
Matthew Clower: I agree that there are people out there who tweet stuff I’m interested in ‘some of the time’. And sure, I could add a ‘Kinda Interesting’ group to TweetDeck. Problem is, there are also people who tweet stuff I’m interested in ‘all of the time’. And if I spend any time on the ‘Kinda Interesting’ group, it’d be at the expense of the ‘Always Interesting’.
Amanda Jeptha: Very nicely put: “I’m comfortable following the 80-90 mark. As relationships change so too does the list of people I follow, so I am constantly meeting new people, building sound relationships as I go.” This is my answer to those who suggest you can’t build your network (or increase its richness) by following only a few.
@writenowbiz
I must say some of the comments seem a little hostile. I’m not reading anything here of being dictated to keep it at 100 or any other number. But on both sides of the issue here some other thoughts.
If you do follow thousands of people and actually answer them IMO it can absolutely cost money! spending two hours tweeting is how much money that could have been put to writing/designing etc? There are some people I know don’t read my tweets back to them…or at least they never respond. And I’ve had a couple people that have followed me multiple times – joining, unfollowing then following again.
On the other side of things I admit I look for tweets of value. What does it add to my day? How does it make my job easier, inspire me, give me information, whatever?
Everyone has their own level where it becomes difficult to keep up after a certain point. I don’t automatically think I should follow every person because there may not be anything in common listed. Perhaps they (hopefully!) find value in what I say. And there’s a few I follow that are not following me because their tweets are interesting.
I think we all need to know our boundaries where it crosses marketing and enjoyment to distracting and a job. It can be a useful tool (and so far has for me but am still learning!) or suck the life out of your business. I think it’s like anything – balance is important. JMO
@alexschleber
I’d have to mostly disagree. If you only follow the same 100 people, there will be so much that you’re missing.
As you already point out, it is virtually impossible to process every tweet for even just 50-100 determined/active tweeters one might follow. I’ve previously called this the “following myth”, i.e. that it could be accomplished at nearly any number.
(Even if you have people from whom you expect top/relevant content all of the time as you describe, you will already have to apply some filtering/choosing. So really you are arguing for the limitations of your current filtering tools.)
So the key becomes a mixture of filtering (for keywords that are of particular interest to you, #hashtags as content grouping devices of sorts, etc.) and serendipity. You discover a new follower more fully when you make them your friend, and check out their bio, sample of past tweets, blog/site link, asf.
Over time, the law of averages means that you will hear from most of them in some way, and may then choose to interact/converse to deepen the connection. If something someone just said stands out to you, you often THEN refresh your overview of their profile and drill deeper into what they’ve been talking about recently.
Over time you pick up on patterns of people’s tweeting style, and a lot of information can/will be processed unconsciously even if you don’t read with a lot of intention. Your mind works much faster under the hood than your conscious mind can keep track of.
Also, your reach will always be limited if you’re not following back most people that follow you (subject to reasonable exclusions of spammers or people that just don’t apear as a good fit). Again, you cannot up front know what goodies will be sent your way from everyone, and that is a good thing. The only way you know is if you only follow a relatively tight inner circle, which then becomes somewhat boring/predictable. It may even be a form of group think…
@JohannaBD
Great topic and very thought provoking Glenn. I constantly wondered whether I should follow everyone back and started that way, but have become more careful about who gets my follows now as I got lost with all the tweets.
You are so right about trying to keep track of everything, but I’m not sure I can limit it to 100. We’ll see how I go.
@moonbridgebooks
To each his own, but I agree with Glenn. I check profiles to see if their first page of tweets has anything of interest to me, if not I won’t follow back (unless they are an actual friend or relative who is not a twitter annoyance). You can bet anything super interesting in Twitterworld will be retweeted all around, so I’m not afraid of missing something. I also am not too fond of those who tweet every 2 minutes for hours at a time – too noisy for me. I am good at skimming thru tweets, though.
@divinewrite
Hi Alex. Thanks for your great comment. Really appreciate you taking the time to put so much thought into it, and to post those thoughts here! A couple of things:
1) I don’t follow “the same 100 people”. My following list is always evolving. Not as fast as many others’ lists are growing, but evolving, nonetheless. In fact, I’d argue that it’s ‘evolving’ faster, and more accurately reflects my needs than thousands-strong list…
2) I don’t use any filtering tool. To me, filtering and sorting are merely ways of NOT reading certain tweets. I want to hear everything said by the people I follow. Simple as that. I find reading every tweet very informative (certainly not a myth). If I follow more people and filter/sort/group, it won’t give me any more time in the day, and it won’t make me read any faster. It’ll just give me less time to read the tweets of the people I’m following now.
3) I check out the bio and last 30-100 tweets of everyone who follows me. So I think the only thing that’s likely to paint me into a ‘group-think’ corner is my own tastes/prejudices in who to follow.
4) Agree 100% with your statement: “Over time you pick up on patterns of people’s tweeting style, and a lot of information can/will be processed unconsciously even if you don’t read with a lot of intention. Your mind works much faster under the hood than your conscious mind can keep track of.” This is definitely part of my current reading process.
5) I don’t agree that my reach is significantly limited. The same law of averages you refer to also dictates that most of the really interesting stuff eventually filters through in retweets. When it does, I often take the opportunity to revisit their profile and consider following. This is esp the case for ppl who have minimal tweets when they first follow me, but who end up being great twitterers.
Very interesting and thought-provoking comment, though, for all that I disagree with most of it.
@SEO_Web_Design
How about using http://tweettrail.com/ to identify users that tweet the most about any given topic (stay on topic) that you may be interested in? This is very helpful and cuts out a lot of guessing.
Re: the “Twitter Elite”… pardon me but screw them. Who gave them their rock star badges? Following someone with 20,000 followers, and they are following 100… well, you get to see all of their mundane posts and links to their blogs, and they will never reply to you no matter how many @user or DMs you send. Great. No not bitter ha! I just find that “superstar” status to be… questionable. I guess I do much better with people that actually interact with me rather than ignore, but that’s me.
I screen each and follow back nearly all – not a problem – everyone posts gems and everyone posts noise. It’s all good. But I DID unfollow a lot of the “Twitter Elite” because, well they just didn’t seem too elite to me.
Thanks,
Jim
@lisahickey
Hallo hello! I have to jump in and add my two cents to this fascinating and very polarizing topic. As someone who follows a lot of people (over 10,000), I’d like to state how it works for me.
1.) No, I don’t “follow” every tweet everyone says. I think people are taking the word “follow” very literally here. That’s simply not how it works for me. I connect with people, people from every country in the world. People who have different interests, values, ideas than me. People who are simply people and don’t even know what “value” in a tweet is. People who are simply willing to share ideas, or thoughts, or a part of themselves, with the world.
2.) I skim the stream, at random times during my day, not having pre-conceived expectations of what I will find. I wait until something engages me, and then act on that tweet.
3.) Nobody says something interesting ALL the time. But everyone says something interesting SOME of the time. At the moment someone says something interesting to me, that is the moment I engage with that person. I don’t pre-judge anyone or their ideas.
4.) I get to know on a deeper level, 2 or 3 new people a day. People that I never would have met any other way besides following a lot of people on Twitter. Sometimes it is because someone likes an idea I have. Sometimes it is because I like an idea they had. But if I don’t connect with a lot of people, I miss out on all those potential people.
5.) People who want to interact with me personally know enough to @ or DM me. Then they are instantly on my radar. And when they do that (as long as it’s not an auto-dm) I take the time to read their blog, or more of their tweets, or find out more about them as a person.
That’s how * I * use Twitter. It has been life-changing for me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And that’s the beauty of it. Twitter * can * be whatever you want it to be.
@justinparks
Absolutely spot on post. There is a horrible misconception on the twitter stream at the moment about the number of followers vs. following ratio and this is spilling over into so many different things I can foresee some very adverse effects in the near future.
“Size isnt everything”. Ok, not the exact point I want to make, maybe “Ratio isnt everything” is more on the mark but people are taking time to understand this and also to realise the significance of numbers against quality against frequency of use.
Its completely pointless having 40k followers who never read what you say and are only using twitter once every 60 days.
Much better to have 200 or 2000 dedicated, quality active and interested and interesting people in your network. Might be a while before some advertising agencies and businesses figure this out though (as usual).
@dashaver
Hi Darren, I completely agree with you. I started out following everyone who followed me; I didn’t want to snub anyone. I think I had to get past that way of thinking, this is not like saying Hi to a person and it is rude not to return the greeting. This is more like your list of favorites or your RSS reader. Going at it from that point of view it is pointless to follow everyone who follows you.
@Kabatology
“ I like to read every tweet I receive, so I can only follow a small handful of people who are very relevant to my business.” — That’s why i follow only 75-80 fellows and not more. I often have to do some trimming — nothing personal, just that i often hate “off-topic”. Great post
@cindyscottday
I respectfully disagree. As a writer, I love having a large twitter stream. It is very much like a global stream of consciousness, and I find it very helpful to stay on top of trends and finding story ideas. But I heavily depend on TweetDeck also. I maintain a smaller group of people who make up more of my “inner circle.” If my larger group continues to grow substantially, I may find it necessary to have several smaller groups for different purposes.
@ProcrastWriter
This post has me torn. Earlier last week I asked myself this very question–”Should I be following everyone who follows me?” I’ve read blog posts for following everyone who follows you and against following everyone who follows you, so it makes it hard to decide.
I think the reason I follow pretty much everyone who follows me is because I want to know what the people who follow me want to know. Obviously following a lot of people means you can’t read every single post, but if you think about it, it’s really not necessary to read every post. I tend to skim thru my Twitter dashboard to see what people are talking about, that way I can respond if I think it’s necessary to.
I think we can better serve our followers on Twitter if we know what they are talking about/want to know about. Sure, there are people I follow who are important to my business, but that doesn’t mean the people who aren’t essential to my business don’t still need me to follow them.
@mainakjas
While I do not advocate following too many people on Twitter, I disagree with the view that future applications should be based on the Followers: Following ratio. Consider what would happen if users started unfollowing others en masse to ge a high Followers:Following ratio. I feel the number of followers is a fair way to measure a user’s popularity.
@jacaldwell
I’ve been thinking about unfollowing some people that are not as relevant to me to remove the noise around the people that are.
Thanks for helping me make my decision!
@nwjerseyliz
This issue is about all we talked about in my Tweetstream yesterday and has been an ongoing topic since Tweetergetter & Hummingbird popped their Auto-Following heads up.
I read two conference reports, one where a SM expert called those who choose who they follow on an individual basis “Twitter Nazis” and another where a SM expert called them (us! me!) “Twitter Snobs”! Just because we don’t want Tweets in our Tweetstream on every get rich quick scheme.
I follow most people back but I want to be able to control the content of what comes over my Tweetstream, I don’t want jerks & MLM & people who just promote themselves and their businesses. Just like I wouldn’t throw open the doors of my house and say to everyone walking past, “Come on in!” I want to invite in my friends and family, people who I have something in common with, people who are interesting or funny, people who live nearby or in my parent’s hometown, people who are in my occupational field. But not every Amway or cable salesman.
This Auto-follow/Auto-unfollow situation has gotten ridiculous and has led me to block people I know will just unfollow me if I don’t Auto-follow them back. I get notices of people unfollowing me and I’m tired of seeing the names of people who just started following me yesterday. Give me a chance to get to know you before I decide whether to follow you or not. Sometimes it takes longer than 24 or 72 hours.
I appreciate your analysis of the situation. By the way, I follow over 400 people who don’t follow me back and I don’t care! I enjoy reading what they have to say and if I send them a reply, they almost always respond back.
@JRuud17
I agree 100% with what you said and learned quite a bit about Twitter practices. Thanks
@nonprofitorgs
Follow everyone who follows you if you want a lot of followers… and then “Favorite” those 100 you only want to read. No one uses the Favorites Tool on Twitter. They should.
@PartyTentsNowls
Extrordinary.
If you are right, and people do nothing, the fadd will burn out
If you are right, and people (who are using it for business) manage their time by using it to drop money to the bottom line, the twitter will have a long healthy life
I suspect it will travel the former.
I am in total agreement with your position, and shall share it with others.
Scott
@carlarose
I don’t feel guilty for not following someone who follows me. On the other hand, I do follow more than 100 people. Though I don’t read every single Tweet (and probably won’t even if I only had <100) I still enjoy everyone that I do follow when I happen to catch what they have to say. Every few weeks I clean up my list so that I won’t have any dead weight, but I am careful who I follow so I have about 100+ more followers than people I follow. It’s not personal; there are many people that don’t follow me back.
@jgraziani
One of the main reasons I started using Twitter was to learn about social media. There are so many great people who are sharing what they know — an I never know who I’ll learn something from next! How could I not follow? And I’m always seeing new people who are just trying to learn, as I was when I started more than a year ago. So, why wouldn’t I follow them and learn from them, as well as share what I have learned with them? Not making any judgements, just saying there are more reasons to follow out there, and more than one way to use the tool successfully. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
@johnpemble
I read all of the people I follow on Twitter so I can keep up with the information. Right now I have 700 followers and I follow back 400. That’s a tough number to keep up with, but the relationships & information I get from keeping up allows me to have a better pool of information for better social life and it leads to professional opportunities. I don’t think I can follow many more people because I want to maintain the relationships I started.
@iGoMogul
Glenn,
We thought this post was useful for beginning twitterers because new users (or some forgetful seasoned users, even us) could benefit from any twitterquette advice. The article definitely gave a frame of reference for new twitterers to think about before they start tweeting away! New users may think it counter-intuitive to not follow everyone back; saying it’s OK for the stay-at-home mom to not have to add back that X-treme sports follower might relieve some of that Twitterquette pressure! Good job!
@gammawaves
Thank you for this well-written post. I haven’t been on twitter for a long time, and I really started wondering about some people with thousands of followed and followers. And I asked myself why some guys followed me who don’t have anything in common with me – many of them obviously just tried to sell me something. When not followed in return, they soon lost ‘interest’ anyway.
At first I was so happy to have any followers at all, I returned the favour to everyone who followed me. But why should I follow someone whose tweets are just boring or obviously commercial? So I stopped following everyone, unfollowed some and lost a few of my followers.
It’s like back at school, isn’t it? You have to decide if you want to be a ‘popular’ guy or gal, or one of the geeky, freaky ones.
I’ve been a geek & a freak then, so I can cope with being one now. And no-one of those twitterers actually knows me. So – does it really matter?
@hectorhenry17
Wao that rude and right. well i try the app you say an i receive some surprise, about doze that dont tweet often. Sometimes i have the problem you mention that its to much tweets to read adn its stress me a lot becuase i would like to read all and some of them are complely on usefull.
So i reach to a point that i will not fallow from know on no body that dont seems to have nothing good to offer of ocourse to my point of view.
That you for the pots.
@WayneLiew
Everyone uses Twitter differently and you are putting up another approach. I think it is not necessary to reciprocate follows. When I receive notifications that someone is following me, I will go through several things before deciding whether to follow back.
I don’t read everything and I use the filters on Tweetdeck to pick questions and relevant tweets that could help me interact with my community. If you have chosen who to follow based on relevance of their tweet to your interests, you will find that despite following thousands, you can still keep up and interact with people that you are following.
I follow people with tweets that I am interested in and when they start moving away from the theme, I will unfollow. It is important to follow because you’ll never know when you can lead a helping hand or participate in a conversation.
@neosix
Finally, the truth about Twitter. I do not follow “Big names” and boring bloggers who tweets only their posts.
I follow only those who have something to say…
@kones
There’s one way of looking at a twitterfeed that you didn’t mention. I tend to look at my feed like a firehose of information. I know that I can’t digest all of it, and for a while, I was drowning. But once I viewed it as a stream to hop in and out of, I was a lot happier and able to handle following a lot of people. I still agree with most of what you’ve said. It’s just another way to look at twitter interaction.
@microchaotic
I agree that a manageable number of followees is essential. I follow more than 100 people but I’m still trying to figure out who and why I follow people. I have a lot of varied and sometimes random interests so I follow a range of different sorts of people. I did think following back was just what you did at first but I’ve learned from that experience. You could easily say I’m still “playing the field” on twitter.
I’ve given this topic a lot of thought lately because I like twitter and I want to stay interested in it. I want other people to stay interested in it too. I want my tweets to be interesting to my followers (though I can’t quite bring myself to make contrived posts just to sound interesting… so I want people following me who actually are interested in what I say and do outside of twitter). Following too many people could easily lead to information overload disinterest syndrome for me or everyone.
Anyway, I wasn’t really sure how to decide who and why to follow but your post has given me some better ideas for that so I wanted to thank you. I also benefited from reading your opinions on whether or not unfollowing or not following was rude. I still err on the side of caution because I remember when netiquette was a much bigger deal to a larger ratio of people using the web.
@divinewrite
I’ve been reading every comment posted over the last week. Sorry for not responding. I was at SMX Sydney, and it threw every into chaos!
At SMX, I spoke to Darren Rowse (owner of this blog) about his Twitter approach. He takes a similiar approach to many who’ve commented here. Kinda dips in and out of the main stream and usese TweetDeck groups for anyone he can’t afford to miss.
I definitely understand the sense in that approach. The random dipping combined with groups is kinda like watching TV. Someone above drew this analogy. I know I have some fav channels, but I still channel surf.
Difference for me on Twitter is, any time I spend dipping into tweets by ppl who aren’t in my ‘must-see’ list only takes away from my time on those ‘must-see’ tweets. That’s what it keeps coming back to, for me.
I know my approach is a little ‘email’ for some, but I get SO much value out of their tweets, that I really feel like I’m losing out if I don’t catch all of them. It was bad enough when I was at SMX, and since returning. Basically for the last 5 days, I haven’t had a chance to go through the last 200 tweets in the TweetDeck ‘All Friends’ column, as I usually do every morning. Simply too much to do. That’s been really bothering me. I feel like I’m right out of the US/UK/Europe loop. I’m still reading every tweet I get during business hours, but it’s distressing me, nonetheless.
Anyway, enough about me. Thanks heaps, everyone, for the great comments here. Regardless of whether you agreed or disagreed, I’m just happy to see so much serious thought going into Twitter use. It bodes well for the medium!
Cheers.
@satyadeo
Finally, the truth about Twitter.
I think i should unfollow people whose tweets do not interest me.
@ryanv49er
Instead of unfollowing all of your followers (for numerous reasons this can be a bad idea), why not set up a Twitter tool such as tweet deck. You can arrange all of your contacts into different groups, so that the twitterers you care about are visible, and the one’s you aren’t too interested in are invisible. This gives you the best of both worlds. You get to follow many people, yet you only have to listen to the one’s you are interested in.
@2009Taxes
I agree, I have an account for my personal tweets where I only follow 100 people of so and sometimes that is too many. The business accounts were I follow thousands are only good for the occasional retweet.
@jenfrahm
Twitter would mean little to me without Tweetdeck. I agree with the magic number of 100, that’s how many are in my group that I *always* read. The other columns are special interest groups / collectives. I do unfollow, quite often in fact, if the person’s tweets just don’t add value to me / my life / my clients. And I love getting notification of who has unfollowed me – it just makes life so much less cluttered.