140Char

Are you a fan of the same people? (Pic: wvs on flickr)

Unlike the people who apparently follow thousands publicly on Twitter, and then have a second account to follow the people they actually listen to, I only have the one main Twitter account.

And until today, I proudly stated that I’d only ever unfollowed two people - but following 1970+ was beginning to stretch even my Twitter Addiction Disorder.

So I thought I’d do a quick check, via Twitter Karma.

In the end, I reduced my Following figure by about 30 or so. Not major, but I don’t think I can realistically go over 2000 for the time being and still interact with a reasonable percentage of people - so it frees up 30 more follows for people.

The criteria for unfollowing was a combination of:

• If the account hadn’t been updated in over 100 days.
• If it was someone spammy I’d mistakenly let through.
• If it was someone whose interests etc were completely unrelated to mine, their blog didn’t help, and I’d never interacted with them in any way.
• Or if it was a fake account or a discontinued service.

What surprised me was the amount of followers for accounts that hadn’t been updated in a year, or for discontinued services.

I wonder how many people are following dead accounts, or those that have since been revealed to be fake, or changed purpose.

So do you ever review who you’re following?

At some point recently, I appeared to have achieved critical mass on Twitter - that is, I get a trickle of people requesting to follow me, even when it isn’t reciprocal, or when I haven’t been particularly active. Sometimes the trickle turns into a miniflood, but I always check out every single follower to decide whether to return the favour - and my ratio of Following to Followers is pretty close to 1:1 (Here’s the proof).

But the decision is getting much harder, because a seemingly increasing number of people are following without giving me a clue of who they are, or why I should return the favour. And following almost 1500 people means I’m becoming more careful about the signal to noise ratio of people I’m following.

• Following me, but having updates protected: Unless I know who you are, or you’ve sent me a message, and your updates are protected, how can I guess whether to guess to request to return the favour?
• No weblink or informative Bio: A lot of people, myself included, have bio information which doesn’t outline exactly what we do for a job, or where our exact interests lay. For instance, mine is: ‘Social Media, Community Marketing,Blogger,Dad,Writer’, but I’ve seen a lot more vague descriptions. If that’s combined with an absence of a link to a blog, linkedin profile or some clue about who you are, I’m scratching my head again.
• Weblink doesn’t give me a clue: This seems to happen with certain content platforms - particularly options like Tumblr, where it’s easy to set up a default Tumblelog without leaving any information. That means I need to spend time going through every post for the last few days to find out more, and makes it tempting to move onto someone/something else in this time-starved world.

This doesn’t mean I only follow people with exactly the same jobs and interests - far from it. But I do only follow people who I think will bring something interesting, entertaining or valuable to the party.

And it’s not just me: Even as I started to write this, I noticed Darren Rowse is running a poll on Twitip, asking ‘Do you automatically follow everyone that follows you?’ Currently 89% of those taking the poll have said they don’t, for similar reasons to myself.

Top tips:

So what’s the best way to let people know who you are?

• Insert a relevant personal/company weblink. It can be your blog, your Linkedin profile, your bio on the corporate website etc - just anything that can give some clue about what you do.
• If you have a personal/lifestyle type blog you want to link to, then consider either linking to the About page, or to a special landing page or post created to people arriving from Twitter.
• Consider using your Twitter background to serve up some information. You can pay professionals, or just experiment with your own image, containing some info on yourself.
• And if you’re using Protected Updates, and you want to converse, interact and have a follow reciprocated, then why not contact them via an alternative channel, e.g. an email address on their blog, to let them know who you are and why you’re following them.

It’s an example of what you put into something have a direct relationship with what you get out of it. If you’re informative about who you are, you’re much more likely to get more people finding you, interacting with you, and for those interactions to be far more relevant.

I’m a big believer in trying out things you want to comment on. Especially if it could contribute to the hosting costs for 140char.com.

Therefore, you can now buy the background of my Twitter profile page for 7 days, for just $50 on Twittads, which I wrote about at length on ‘Is Twittads just a fad?’.

(For the record, I’m followed by 1245, and following 1254 - and just posted by 4071st update at the time of writing).

What I’m interested in is finding out whether anyone is willing to shell out $50 for anyone over the 1000 mark, or where exactly the price point evolves to, and I’m really interested in seeing which advertisers are signed up and using the service and what their method is for seeing a Return on Investment.

Will it convert me to thinking there’s a bright future for Twittad?

I’ve been a twitter user for a little while now, and yes, it is addictive. You get used to posting all kinds of stuff as often as possible.

It’s especially addictive when people you have never spoken to start following you for no good reason! It’s the best, so thank you, all my followers.

What quietly bugs me about Twitter is that I wonder if by default, it is really a form of communication.

Plenty of twitter users just pump out the tweets as if they are a lone voice broadcasting to a world who clings to their every word.

As I was informed recently: “You’ve got it (Twitter) all wrong, you don’t hear from your followers, you hear from those you follow”.
This for me, seems wrong. I am not an egotistical evil genius so therefore am into Twitter only for actual communication - not for just pounding out what I’m doing with little regard for others.

I am all into following back my followers. If I am of interest to them, then we can be twitter friends as far as I am concerned.

Twitter takes a little effort if you want to consider it as a mini-social network. I have evenings where I feel like ‘getting myself out there’ and so concentrate on replying to people who have been tweeting and having a little chat.

There were some people I found on Twitter who I followed because they are the internet-famous giants. But for me, those guys can give me no personal contact - they are victims of their own social success. They couldn’t possibly interact with the sheer number of their followers. These sorts I stopped following.

To me, Twitter is all about making friends and networking. I specifically also like to befriend my fellow UK residents, especially if there are geographically near me.

Twitter has to be up close and personal. It’s all about interactive communication.