Apologies to the majority of my readers who couldn’t care less about Twitter. I will have something entertaining up shortly but right now I have to rant.
I had a few spare moments the other night, so I checked in with Twitter. I keep one private list for my favourite Twitter people and everybody else just falls into my default feed. (Of course you are on the list. You don’t even have to ask.) I am pretty much done with listing, grouping, circling or otherwise classifying everybody I have ever interacted with. Who has time for that?
My general policy is that I will follow back anyone who engages with me. I don’t keep track of every new follower I get, but if you reply to one of my tweets, I will follow you. What happens, though, is that the number of people I follow starts to creep up until my feed is full of people I don’t recognize tweeting about stuff I don’t care about. This usually happens once I start following more than 1000 people.
The other night, my private list was quiet and I switched over to the main feed and didn’t recognize anyone. I was following 1400 people, so that made sense. I started to tidy up a bit. I pulled up the bio of the people in my feed to see if I wanted to keep following them. I do this every so often, dropping coupon bloggers from California, corporate accounts that have no relevance to me and anyone who rubs me the wrong way.
“Huh. That’s weird,” I thought. “I’m following this chick but she’s not following me back. I wonder why I started following her.”
“And this self-proclaimed social media guru guy! Why on earth would I follow him?”
“And, wait, I recognize these names! I JUST started following these people!” I was talking to myself by this point.
A pattern started to emerge. A large number of people (there were at least a dozen in my feed that night) seemed to mass follow a bunch of people. Then they spend some time throwing out token replies (engagement!), wait for the inevitable follow and then promptly unfollow in order to rig their follower to followee ratio to make them look like big shots. I know this because I remembered following these people just a day or two earlier.
So the pattern goes: follow, reply, unfollow. Is this what social media experts are preaching now? (Really, tell me if I’m wrong, but this is what it looks like.) Dupe people into following you? That’s the strategy? I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the internet, after all.
I shouldn’t care, but I do.
I care because I actually use Twitter to interact with people and when fuckwits try to game the system they ruin it for all of us.
I’m not saying Twitter is a big social club and you can’t use it for business. Of course Twitter is also a great professional tool. I use it as a platform for sharing my blog posts and other work, to follow accounts I have a professional and/or personal interest in and to network. And the best, most effective way of networking is to meet people in your field and become friends with them. For real. You don’t shake hands and then spam them incessantly. Strangely, that doesn’t seem to work.
The number one thing I consider when deciding to follow someone is their bio. Number two is the quality of their tweets. I don’t care if you have 10,000 twitter followers and only follow 5000. In fact, if you have that big a following and I haven’t heard of you I’m going to be suspicious.
And now I don’t know what to do. I certainly won’t be following back everyone who engages with me which is a crying shame because I have some great online relationships based on just that, a Twitter exchange and follow back. Obviously, if someone engages with me multiple times (and I am able to keep track of them) then I’ll follow them back, but that’s really asking a lot of people.
Instead of engaging with me and building a network of relationships, the people behind these twitter accounts make me want to put up a wall. I hope their impressive Twitter stats make them happy.
I’ll be talking to people with interesting things to say. Call me crazy.
9 replies on “Use Twitter To Interact. Gasp.”
It needs to be said. How annoying. Every once in a while I check the followers and try to follow them back. I am always amazed at how many people follow and then unfollow within a day or two if I don’t immediately #followback. I want people to follow me because they have some minute interest in what I have said or am saying or might say. I don’t want to just be someone’s number boost.
These people don’t realize that 500 engaged followers are actually more valuable than 5000 people who don’t know who you are.
I use a service to notify me of unfollows, so I ditch those jerks asap.
Might have to do that. I’ve never wanted to know who was unfollowing me so as to protect my fragile ego. But the time has come.
I’ve never gotten the hang of Twitter lists. I sort through a lot of filler as a result. This post reminded me to clean up my follow list. I just unfollowed about 100 people in about 15 minutes.
I’ve been seeing the same people following and unfollowing me repeatedly. Drives me nuts.
Me too. Must be some sort of program that does it.
Hey Rebecca,
I feel you here. I don’t follow everyone who follows me.
My “rule” (if you can call it that), is that I converse with almost everyone, even if I don’t follow them. Usually, if I have a lot of back and forths that I enjoy with someone, then I’ll follow them.
Perhaps that will help you here. Still engage with people who reply to you, but don’t feel like you have to follow them right away. Take your time! :)
That’s a good plan, Sarah. I think that’s what I’ll have to do.
I’m going to make this really easy for you: follow me. I’ll be the greatest thing that ever happened to your Twitter feed.
Or at least not the worst thing that happened to your twitter feed.
Ok, maybe the worst thing, but you’ll feel really good about yourself once you see what my life is like in 140 characters or less.
Seriously, though, I have the same list. It’s called The Unmissables. Someone retweeted your Costco post and it showed up in there, which is how I found you. It was meant to be. WE WERE MEANT TO BE.
I might be the creepiest thing that ever happened to your Twitter feed, too.