Oh no (I hear you groan) – not ANOTHER article on Twitter. It’s true, it has been a virtual Twitter article cyclone recently as the unassuming microblogging site has gone mainstream (thank you Stephen Fry). In line with my post a little while back complaining about the tank needing refilling, the last thing I am going to do is yet another blog post on the best ways to use Twitter. Rather, I just want to ask a question.
Albert Maruggi brought to my attention the latest ‘fad’ which claims to gain you 16000 followers in 90 days simply through auto-generating Tweets. The relationship question about this aside (and I think it is an important one, which Albert considers in his post), this kind of thing raised a question for me.
No, the question wasn’t whether this could be regarded as spam (could it? It is opt-out so perhaps it isn’t) It is more wondering how many people do an automatic follow back of anyone who follows them?
I don’t (which is why I have more followers than followees). Whenever someone follows me, I take some time to have a look at their profile and decide whether I want to follow them. I will have a look to see what they have tweeted up until now and I will try and determine from their bio whether they might be tweeting something which would be interesting to me. As such, if this automated system followed me, chances are I probably wouldn’t follow back. But it seems that 16,000 others would.
What percentage of people are like me, and what percentage follow everyone?
How often do you go out searching for new people to follow? Are you proactive, or reactive?
Do you unfollow people if you don’t like their tweets or do you prefer to keep your numbers up?
Do you automatically unfollow people if they unfollow you?
I am really curious as to how other people use Twitter. I tend to use it reasonably carefully – if my attention is going to be grabbed, I want it to be grabbed by someone with something valuable to say. I want the 20% – 30% of Tweets which do make it through to my Tweetdeck to be worthwhile. And I want to know that the person I am establishing a relationship with by following them is a real person. To me social media is less about quantity and more about quality. The nature of an advertising driven capitalist society is such that this probably isn’t the case for many, particularly on the business side, but what Twitter does is give you as the consumer the power to choose whether or not you want to listen. That has to be a step forward, even if the tools are slowly being commandeered by the broadcast marketers.
Thank you to Pieter Musterd for the image
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Tags: followers, Microblogging, Twitter
