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Twitter: The Ins and Outs of
Following and Unfollowing Tweeple
At some point in the life of any active Twitter user, you have to make decisions on how you are going to handle following and not following other tweeple. In my case, I want to follow anyone who follows me, but I've found that's not possible. Too many spammers, sexual come-ons, and other scams.
I've also found that when I follow someone, I do expect them to follow me back. When they don't (even though I'm a worthwhile person to follow), I find myself wanting to unfollow them because otherwise it's only a one-sided conversation and I'm looking for two-way relationships.
I think that some celebrity tweeters (i.e., Oprah or Ashton) don't get the value of following people on Twitter; they use Twitter only as a broadcast medium. That's their loss.
Personally, I value the insights, laughs, thought-provoking ideas, emotional boosts, differing perspectives, etc. that I get from following tweeple from around the world. I wouldn't give that up even if no one followed me.
I believe it's more important who you follow than who follows you.
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Do Not Follow: The Rules :))
Here are some of the reasons that I don't follow people on Twitter, even when they have followed me. Perhaps you'll find these guidelines useful in your own use of Twitter. Note that I also include the Do Follow Rules later in this post.
1. Don't follow people who still have a generic user avatar. Generally I don't follow people who haven't taken the time to put up a photo of themselves or another image that represents their brand. I figure I can wait to follow them after they get around to that. It's really simple to upload an image to your Twitter profile so I don't know why people skip this step when they set up their profiles.
2. Don't follow people who have not yet tweeted. I don't follow people who have never tweeted unless they are a friend I know well (I give friends a little latitude here). The purpose of following people is to enjoy their tweets. If they haven't tweeted, why follow?
3. Don't follow people who tweet excessive promos. If all you are tweeting is the same message over and over again, I don't follow you. There's no reason to follow you. For example, @Yenova's last 11 tweets before following me were: Check out my blog! xxx.blogspot.com. Where's the content? Something interesting? Here's another example:
@hadbiz tweeted the same post over and over again: help the earth buy all organic cleaning products at https://xxx.biz and help support an American business.
Now, I support buying organic products, but I do not support such Twitter spam. Not interesting. Why not tell me something wonderful about your products, product by product. You could do hundreds of really useful tweets rather than spamming.
4. Don't follow people who have nothing to offer you. I get followed by a lot of different people, but I'm really not interested in real estate sales in Kansas City, hotels in Myrtle Beach, tiles of any sort, or whether hospitals are U.S. Final Pass certified.
I can appreciate that some tweeple might want to follow me because they have a book or Internet promotion coming up, but unless they tweet about those things and not just their own business focus, I see no reason to follow them.
5. Don't follow people who tweet in a language you can't read. Why follow someone you can't read. For me, that means if they never tweet in English, I don't follow them because I'd never get any value from their tweets. I wish I could read Chinese, Portuguese, etc., but I can't. My loss. That's the only reason I didn't follow @fatovix, even though they seem to have something interesting to say.
6. Don't follow sex come-ons. As with any popular site on the web, eventually the sex spammers join in. I actively block these people rather than just ignore them. I'd like to keep Twitter clear of these come-ons. The same is true for betting sites.
7. Don't follow people who list no location. I tend to avoid people who give no location. I feel like they have something to hide. If they offer good tweets, I might follow them despite this lack. But, if they are on the border line, no location means no follow.
8. Don't follow people without a bio. I will often follow people simply because they sound interesting (as described in their profile bio). If they don't have a bio and their tweets are at all suspect, I won't follow them. I prefer to know something about the person I'm following.
9. Don't follow people who don't follow back. If a person's following/followers ratio is way out of whack, I will tend not to follow them. I make exceptions for Oprah, Peter King, and very few others, but I won't follow most celebrities who don't follow tweeple.
I'm a firm believer that the greatest value of Twitter is in who you are following (and the relationships that can be built from people following each other). So I avoid following people who don't follow back (as measured by their following/follower ratio).
But I do understand the other side, as noted by Tim O'Reilly (a person I do follow who doesn't follow me):
If you’re even a minor-league celebrity like me, there are way more people who are interested in what you are doing or thinking that you can possibly keep up with. I can’t even keep up regularly with the 500+ people I do follow on Twitter; keeping up with the 400,000 who follow me would be impossible.
Asymmetric follow is why I use Twitter regularly and Facebook much less often. With Twitter’s model, I can find people I’m interested in, whether or not they know me, and learn about them and their lives and thoughts. Others can include me in their lists. You become “friends” with complete strangers over time, by communicating with them (responding with @messages for example), perhaps by mutual following. In fact, Twitter’s wonderful system of @ messages means that anyone can address me - and so I find myself having conversations with complete strangers as well. I actually follow my @ messages more faithfully than I do my planned Follow list.
For Tim's complete post on this issue, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/ goodreads-vs-twitter-asymmetric-follow.html.
10. Don't follow people who follow too many people. One of the signs that someone is going to be a spammer is that their following/followers ratio is way out of whack in the other direction. They are following 2001 people and have 25 followers. I avoid these people, especially if they don't have interesting tweets.
11. Don't follow people who think Gary McCaffrey has a crazy idea. I actively avoid people who follow me only to build their own lists. I stopped auto following people when the spammers started to take over. I now review everyone who follows me and decide who to follow back. I'd love to follow everyone back, but I don't want to follow people who don't really understand the relationship building nature of Twitter. [Notice that @garymccaffrey only follows 183 people but has 36,853 followers. He doesn't get the relationship thing.]
Here are some of the other tweets that will stop me from following you:
Generate thousands of followers for your twitter profile with this easy tool: xxx.com.
Internet marketers, "The Twitter Trick" was just revealed. Find out more.
Friends, just thought some of you may want to know about "The Twitter Secret"
Nearly 3,500 people have joined the RETWEET.com movement, thats not b: ad.
Can you get 87,000 Twitter followers? @ViralURL wants to give you that chance...
12. Don't follow people who tweet only what they are doing. If you are one of those people who only answer the basic Twitter question: What are you doing?, I'm not likely to follow you. I'm not interested in what you are eating, what the weather is like outside your window, etc. I want to know what you think, what you feel, what makes you laugh, what makes you cry, what makes you sing, what turns you on. I'm also interested in what you've discovered, blog posts you find interesting, pages on your own website that might interest me, things you can teach me.
13. Don't follow people who repeatedly ask you to please retweet. For example, @followmetools's first words are always Please RT. Sorry, I'm not interested in doing your promotions. If you have something interesting to say or point to, I'll retweet you. If one in ten of your posts asks me to RT, I'll still follow you. But every post is excessive. You lost me.
14. Don't follow people who are all about money. I avoid anyone who only talks about money. They are boring. For example, @megzz123.
15. Don't follow people with unreal profile names. For example, @megzz123 or @timonthyucducd or @2Gy7ug (whose account was suspended due to strange activity).
16. Don't follow people who use TwitAd excessively. I avoid anyone who is using TwitAd or similar services excessively. It's not worth it for them or for me. They're not likely to make much money from such advertising schemes, and they will offend me by posting such advertising excessively.
17. Don't follow people who use someone else's photo. When I noticed that @wealthsites_ used Joel Comm's photo for their profile image, I did not follow. Never will. If it had been one of Joel's profiles, he would have said so.
18. Don't follow people with nonexisting websites. When someone lists a URL like this: http://yjhsgtyy, I don't follow. An obvious spammer.
19. Don't follow people who thing Twitter sucks. Here's an actual post from someone: twitter sucks actually. Their other posts were just as uninteresting.
20. Avoid network marketers whose only focus is network marketing. I think network marketing is a legitimate way to sell anything, but I don't like tweeters who only tweet their network marketing. For example, @qivanahealth.
21. Don't follow people who only tweet cryptic messages to others. Here are some posts from one such person. Note how boring his tweets are for anyone else to read. It's okay to respond to other people, but once in awhile, make an original contribution.
@anonymous Good to know
@anonymous ROFL
@anonymous Do it! Do it! You'll love it.
@anonymous LOL @ House Party
22. Don't follow Twitter's suggested users unless you really want to follow them. Most of them aren't all that interesting anyway. Do follow PeteCashmore @mashable. Very interesting and a good sharer.
23. Don't follow people obsessed with followers, whose most recent tweets make continual reference to getting more Twitter followers. Twitter is not a popularity contest.
24. Don't follow people who are rude, swearing constantly, argumentative, or otherwise combative. It's not worth your time to deal with people who have on-going issues.
25. Don't follow people who use RSS auto posts 90% of the time. With Twitter, you can use services like TwitterFeed to feed your blog posts or other RSS feeds into your Twitter stream. If your tweets consist primarily of such RSS feeds, I'm not likely to follow you because there will be no opportunity to interact with you.
26. Don't follow people who really don't matter to you. Simple rule of friendship or potential friendship.
27. Don't follow people who make rules for you. Except me :))
Here are a few other signs that have caused other people not to follow tweeple:
- All you ever do is retweet. No original contribution.
- Your Twitter username is something like magicmillions or creditwonder or some other obvious salesy name.
- Your Twitter updates are private.
- You don't include your real name in your Twitter profile.
- You use a MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter link as your web URL.
- Your location is something like east of the second star past midnight or everywhere but here or my center is everywhere.
- Too many tweets. Some users don't like to follow tweeple who dominate their Twitter stream with flighty posts.
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Note: You can edit the tweet before you send it out.For tweeple following and unfollowing tools, see http://www.bookmarket.com/twitter-people.htm.
Do Follow: The Rules :))
1. Follow those who follow you. Generally I want to follow anyone who follows me. The exceptions are listed in the above rules. I believe that if someone is interested in following me, I should follow them. I've made some wonderful friends and interesting discoveries by doing so.
2. Follow interesting people. Anyone who has an interesting bio and interesting tweets is worth following. Here are a few examples of interesting bios (at least of interest to me) from recent followers:
@shellykramer - Marketing strategist, writer, idea generator, creator of buzz 'n awareness, social media enthusiast + information junkie. Wife+mom+friend to many
@bikerdreamlady - a dreamer who dreams big dreams and likes to learn and experience new things
@bevanwilde - Very driven and loves helping others grow and succeed. The key to financial success isn't about things but about the relationships you develop and cultivate.
@rototillers - My name is James - gardening is my favorite hobby. I started RototillerStore.com as a way to 'fund' that hobby. :) Hope you enjoy my tiller Tweets! :)
3. Follow true friends. I follow all my friends and family once I know they are on Twitter. It's one more way I can keep in touch with them.
4. Follow people with similar interests. I follow writers, publishers, booksellers, Internet marketers, social mavens, dog lovers, content creators, quotation lovers, etc. These are all among my major interests so I want to follow such people because they will usually have something interesting to say to me.
5. Follow people with similar values. If you are conservative, you can follow other conservative people even if you have no other mutual interests.
6. Follow people with dissimilar interests. I like to discover things on Twitter, so I follow many people who don't share my major interests. They are the people who often introduce me to new ideas or new ways of looking at things.
For example, I just followed a man writing about rototillers and someone else writing about training for triathlons. Now I don't have a big enough garden to need a tiller and I don't run triathlons, but I expect these people to be interesting nonetheless.
7. Follow people with dissimilar values. If you are liberal, follow some conservatives as well. You could learn something from them. If you are conservative, there are things you could learn from liberals as well. I follow Christians, Buddhists, Wiccans, and more. There is always something more for me to learn. I love having my own ideas be challenged by other people's outlooks.
8. Follow those who can help you. I follow some people who do not follow me because they have something useful to contribute. Among the top people I follow that way are @mashable and @timoreilly.
9. Follow strangers. I follow many people simply because I discovered an interesting reply they made to someone else. @shellykramer noted this value so well in her comment on Tim O'Reilly's post (noted above):
People is what makes Twitter so infinitely interesting. Engaging, often with complete strangers, is what makes it fascinating. And finding friends and common interests, sometimes where completely unexpected, whether of a personal or a professional nature, is what is so amazing and unique about the community that is the Twitterverse. Facebook and LinkedIn are definitely more clunky and the permission-based applications become annoying after dealing with something as wonderfully seamless as Twitter.
I have found that many of my richest experiences on Twitter came from people I did not know but followed because they followed me (or had tweeted someone I am following).
I really enjoy that discovery process where strangers lead me to places I would never have discovered on my own. So I follow a lot of people, just for the joy of happenstance discovery.10. Follow foreign. Be sure to follow people from other countries. Twitter is one of the best ways to gain exposure to thousands of people from all over the world. I follow people from Australia, Spain, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Norway, Iceland, Russia, India, South Africa, Kenya, and dozens of other countries. The perspective I gain from them would alone be worth my time spent on Twitter.
11. Follow people who are entertaining. Another way of saying interesting. If someone makes you laugh or cry or shout for joy, they are worth following.
If you'd like to add an idea to the above lists, tweet me @JohnKremer. Thanks for your input.
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Note: You can edit the tweet before you send it out.For tweeple following and unfollowing tools, see http://www.bookmarket.com/twitter-people.htm
Free Twitter Mania Manual download in Word document format: http://www.bookmarket.com/TwitterManiaManual.doc. No strings, ifs, ands, buts attached. Just free.
Free Twitter Mania Manual download as PDF document: http://www.bookmarket.com/TwitterManiaManual.pdf.
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Twitter Away: Miscellaneous Twitter Happenings
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Twitter People: Resources for Finding and Following Tweeple
Twitter Short: Tools for Shortening URLs (and Tracking Clicks)
Twitter Tools and Social Networking Tools
Twitter Trends and Tracking Tools
Twitter User Guides, Handbooks and Blog Posts
How to Get Retweeted on Twitter: http://blog.bookmarket.com/2009 /04/how-to-get-retweeted-on-twitter.html
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