If you are on Twitter the most common question that your friends ask is probably “How many followers do you have?”. Everyone seems to be obsessed with this number. In order to create a large number of followers, most of us Auto Follow anyone who follows us. While Auto Following has its own merits, following a large number of users will reduce the quality of your incoming Twitter feed.
Imagine only following the people you are really interested in! How great it would be to follow the top 100 bloggers in your niche. Having fewer followings mean you will pay more attention to your feed. This gives you a better opportunity to interact and mingle with the people you follow. When people notice that you are in conversation with high profile users, they think high of you as well, and they want to follow you too!
A while ago my Twitter following was really low. I never missed any Tweet from my favorite bloggers. I was able to interact with them. I have seen on number of occasions that my followers spiked when a popular blogger replied to my Tweet. But, with a large incoming Twitter feed (due to Auto Follow) you miss these valuable opportunities.
You might think that the solution to following a large number of people is to filter out unwanted Tweets. There are many applications that can be used to filter Tweets from your incoming feed. But as the Twitter user community gets more educated everyone would be using some kind of filtering tool. May be 90% of your followers already have some type of filtering in place. You think you have 10,000 followers!. But only 1,000 are really listening to you!
So is it time to stop Auto Following? Should we simply follow only the folks who we are genuinely interested in? Your thoughts and comments are welcome.
7 Responses to “Following, the most neglected aspect of Twitter!” Leave a reply ›
Having big following numbers got popular only because it was so easy to game, and it looks like you are popular. I even tried it a little.
The more I think about Twitter, the more I think it's useless, regardless of what all the "experts" say. You need to tweet repeatedly to get something heard, you are limited to characters, and to make it work for business it time extensive.
Who follows 20,000 RSS feeds? Nobody, because you can't read them all. It's the same for Twitter. I think now, to follow more than 10 or 20 is pushing the limits.
BWI, Thank you for your comments. Having a small and rich Twitter feed certainly gives one a better Twitter experience.
Great article Aaron. I have a growing twitter follower list and I've found it very useful to share information with and to learn from.
I do take your point about missing important tweets so I have set up a separate column in tweet deck for people who I really want to "listen" to. Everyone else is in my main column and I interact with them as and when I can.
Twitter is key to my business although, like anything, it does take effort.
Cheers, Niro
Hi Niro, thank you for your comments. Your Twitter success has been phenomenal!
The point I am trying to make is that if a person has higher following:follower ratio, she will be looked upon as an expert in her field.
I prefer to have a 1:10 following follower ratio than 1:1 (which I currently have). Wouldn't that be the ideal option?
I desperately need to narrow down my following in order to focus on those who truly matter to me. I gamed the system this past summer and saw no positive effects. I didn't get more traffic to my website, ShutUpInternet.com, I didn't have any more @replies on Twitter or retweets.
Reducing Twitter to numbers, like you said Aaron, ruins the Twitter experience and the effectiveness of the platform. I don't care if 500 people are following me if 31 people are actually in conversation with me.
I'm at a crossroads right now as to what direction to take my online ventures. In changing the way I do things online I want to revolutionize my Following. I've considered unfollowing everyone and starting over but that seems impractical.
The solution I've found is to set numbers and not let myself go over a certain number unless there's a good reason. Right now I follow 224 people. The next step in my tweeting is to get that number down to 200. If I feel like there are a lot of tweets coming in that I don't care about I'll go down to 175 or 150 until I get that feed where every tweet is valuable.
I'm happy I came across your blog, Aaron. You've got some great content and I look forward to reading what you've got in store in the future.
If you'd like to follow me on Twitter you can find me @ZackShapiro.
Aaron -
I used this post as inspiration and quoted you in my Thanksgiving resolution post: http://shutupinternet.com/...uide-to-throwing-things-out
Time to clean up my following (and a turkey).
Have a great Thanksgiving!
Zack
Hi Zack,
Thank you for your comments and thank you for quoting my post! The key for Twitter success is to be conversational and make meaningful connections. Yes, you are spot on, 10 really good connections is much better than have 100s of followers who does not add any value.
Cheers
Aaron