Of followers and following

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Continuing the saga of my Twitter obsession, today I’ll talk about following and followers. How many people should you follow, and should you care if anyone follows you?

There seems to be a debate over which is more valuable. Jason Calacanis is giving away a MacBook Air to a follower once he has the most followers on all of Twitter. He often couched this as a competition with Robert Scoble, although Scoble encouraged his followers to follow Calacanis since Scoble argues that the power of Twitter lies in the number of people you follow and not the reverse. To me it’s not an either/or proposition.

The value in having lots of followers is in the crowdsourcing effect. As Calacanis has figured out, you have yourself an instant focus group on which you can bounce ideas. You can also make lazytweet requests or ask for advice. And of course, you can promote your latest content. For these uses to work, you need more than a few followers, so getting a fair share is useful.

On the flip side, the Twitter you see depends completely on who you follow. Lots of folks will sign up for Twitter, follow just the one or two friends who convinced them to join, and give up the pursuit as boring and pointless. To get the most out of Twitter you need to follow a good number of people. You don’t have to know them, you just have to find them interesting. I follow a bunch of journalists, bloggers, authors, technologists, and musicians that I don’t know personally, but their tweets make Twitter useful. Plus when I respond to them, they often write back, which is pretty neat.

Now, I don’t care for the fire hose approach that Scoble takes. He follows everyone that follows him and then some, and that’s over 21,000 now. Too much noise to signal for me. Anytime someone follows me I check out their feed and see if it’s interesting to me. Often it’s not—just very personal anecdotes from someone I don’t know. That’s a fine use for Twitter, just not for me, so I won’t follow. But if there are interesting bits I’ll follow them for a while and see how it goes.

Every so often I’ll prune who I follow. Usually I’ll notice someone’s just not as interesting to me as I thought or maybe they’ve become too self-promotional (moderation is key in this area). But I’m constantly trying out new people that I discover. Everyone’s view of Twitter is different, and the idea for me is to get just the right balance of interesting people and people I know and care about.

Interesting bit: I’ve found that I consistently have about 30 percent more followers than folks I follow. Pretty neat, but I’m not going to follow more folks for the sake of getting more followers. I’m happy with my zen balance and I hope you’ll find yours, too. So, if you haven’t already, go out and hit some follow buttons!

Apr 18, 2008 | Comments | Tags: , ,

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