Twitter Following Choices

I remember when I first signed up for Twitter in 2008. At first glance it was nothing more than public text messaging. It seemed sort of pointless. Wanting to give it a fair chance, I started following a few dozen people. Then (me being me) I started sending tweets into the twitterverse. It didn’t happen immediately, but before too long I “got it”.

As most guides on Twitter spell out, you can carve out your own experience–there is no one right way to use the service. For me, the experience is about the interaction. It’s about reading tweets I’m interested in as well as having a forum to (briefly) spew what happens to cross my mind. Of course the spew is sort of silly unless others are there; bringing to mind the old trope of: if you send text onto Twitter and no one is following you, does it make a tweet? With that in mind, it becomes an interesting exercise in following: who you follow, and how to get others to follow you.

My follow policy is pretty basic: if you tweet stuff that interests me, I’ll follow. I probably don’t follow as many people as I should (I’m working on that). If you tweet stuff that turns me off, or if you’ve effectively abandoned Twitter, then I’ll likely not be following you. If I’ve never followed you, it’s likely for not any particular reason…it’s easy to get lost in the sea of names that stream by. I currently follow a lot of people in the visual and written arts. Many of those, including very familiar names, are personal friends, so I don’t follow them for their celebrity but because actually I know them.

But what about the celebrities? I follow quite a few. Why? While I’m not enamored by celebrity per se (I tend to view them as the working stiffs they are), the fact is that I find value in their tweets. With some it’s a meeting (tweeting?) of minds. With others it’s a bit of vicarious living as they jet hither and thither while I’m still tied to the computer or easel. Some it’s just because I want to keep up with their projects.

The fact is that there are many known people I stopped following. The two biggest reasons were: 1) They bored me; 2) They were too unnecessarily profane. There are at least a dozen people I’d follow if it wasn’t for the profanity. I’m not a prude. I can be as least as vulgar as the next really vulgar person (I program computers after all…we can put sailors to shame). Too often, it’s just thrown in. It wearies me, so I unfollow.

I mention all this for the people who don’t know what to do when they join Twitter. My advice is to follow people you know as well as celebs/shows/causes/info sources you are interested in. It’ll likely take a few sessions before you get your Twitter legs under you. Feel free to drop anyone who takes the bliss out of your experience.

What of that other aspect: getting followers? I figure that it happens if it happens. As long as you tweet whatever it is you tweet, retweet stuff that should be shared, and don’t spam (you can pimp your stuff, just don’t be annoying about it), then people will follow. This is one of those areas where you have to ignore the celebrities in your stream. You’ll see them sign onto Twitter and inside of a day or two they will have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Just like that. Their experience isn’t the grassroots experience, so you need to sort of not pay attention to that.

About the only advice I have if you want more followers is to not tweet “please follow me”. That people aren’t following you isn’t a judgment on you. The fact is that most tweeps don’t even know you exist (i.e. you aren’t a celebrity) or don’t know you are on Twitter. There is the idea that if you tweet good stuff, then they will come all field-of-dreams-like. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Don’t make your worth about the numbers. There’s not a lot of reason for it to be a contest.

For a good article on the follower thing, you should read: How to Get More Followers on Twitter

And what sort of narcissistic blogger (wow…that’s sort of redundant, isn’t it) would I be if I didn’t mention that you can follow me (ME, ME, ME) on Twitter @terpcj? I promise that I may or may not follow you back. It’s hard to predict these things.