Do you know who you are following on Twitter? I certainly didn’t use to.
I was out checking a London workshop venue the other day and a lady showed me around the premises. In order to get pricings and availabilities, I gave her my card as I walked out. The lady (who shall remain unnamed) took a look at my card and said “aah, you follow me on Twitter, my user name is Cookie Girl something” and looked at me like the name would ring a big church bell and I would instantly know who she was. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue and it was all a bit awkward.
I explained that I have an auto-follower function set up (via SocialOomph), that basically follows anyone that follows me on Twitter. Her eyes gave away a mild disappointment; I can imagine being followed by an automatic service isn’t probably that exciting.
On top of this, it also sends an automated welcome message that reads “Hi thanks for following, let’s connect on LinkedIn as well…” She said “I did think your direct message was a bit cheesy and this explains it”.
A peculiar incident it was indeed, something I wasn't really prepared for and don't really want to happen again.
Twitter food for thought
The whole affair got me thinking a bit about my approach to Twitter. I use this micro-blogging service to listen to interesting folks in the social media and personal branding space, to engage with my contacts and to promote blog posts such as this one. Is open networking the way forward or should I go more exclusive?
Let’s look at the two schools of Twitter and see if you can relate to one of these:
Quantity of followers
If you are looking to gain more followers, you should probably follow everyone back. You should probably be mentioning, retweeting, follow Friday, tweeting up etc with every Tweeter you lay your eyes on. When you are in the quantity game, it’s all about that number of followers and how many times you have been listed by other users.
The downside to quantity is that it’s difficult to manage a huge network and you risk coming across as a spammer. Having a big following also doesn’t mean that your messages will be retweeted, au contraire they risk getting lost in the aether.
Quality of followers
Some say you should be a Twitter snob and be very selective about who you follow, basically vetting every user before following back. The idea here is that you are judged on who you follow, not how many people follow you.
The downside to quality is probably that you aren’t reaching as many people as you could. You are relying on your fewer fellow Tweeters to do more sharing to make up for this.
My Twitter policy shift
As you have probably gathered, I have historically been looking to grow my number of followers and I have been following everyone back. This is what I have observed working for online personalities, famous bloggers and marketers like Chris Brogan or Dan Schawbel.
After the other week’s incident, I have shifted my mindset and I am turning away from the fame-based approach to what I feel is more authentic and credible. I have turned off the auto-follower and the automatic welcome message. I have become very mindful of who I follow and my policy is to only follow people that I either know personally or that I believe I can learn from.
Pruning existing followers
Taking it one step further, I decided to have a look at the folks I have been following to see what they are all about. Using applications like Tweepi, I have been able to see who is consistent on Twitter, what their Klout score is and if they are likely to be selling or plugging (read: spamming) their products.
I have started to unfollow automated Twitter feeds or any others that are just a waste of time. The consequences of unfollowing is that they unfollow you, a result I can live with.
Bottom line
I have just begun this shift and it will take weeks to get things in order on Twitter. I will be reporting on how it works out for me so stay tuned.
If you find that you have been unfollowed by me, please don’t take it personally and do tweet me if you object and I might just reconsider!
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