Comments on: Why Following Too Many People Will Cost You $

By: Jen Frahm

Jen Frahm — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:56:41 +0000

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.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:25:08 +0000

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.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:53:53 +0000

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.

By: Satya Thakur

Satya Thakur — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:30:08 +0000

Finally, the truth about Twitter.
I think i should unfollow people whose tweets do not interest me.

By: Glenn Murray

Glenn Murray — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:59:28 +0000

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.

By: Catalyst Echo

Catalyst Echo — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:29:34 +0000

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.

By: kones

kones — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:04:37 +0000

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.

By: neosix

neosix — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:26:57 +0000

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…

By: Wayne Liew

Wayne Liew — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:04:23 +0000

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.

By: Hector A. Henry S.

Hector A. Henry S. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:14:47 +0000

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.