To follow or not to follow? The big Twitter debate.

Written by Andrea Prior on Mar 23, 2009 7:13 pm

Read More: Marketing | Social Networking

This seems to be the latest question about the social networking tool called Twitter.

On the website this is how they describe what Twitter is used for.

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question:- What are you doing?"

Personally I had been wondering about this"following" issue for a few weeks now. I had over 200 followers at one stage and was politely following all these people back. I then felt obliged to try and read all these peoples messages each day.......

It is impossible to "genuinely" follow all those people!

With just 200 followers there were 100's of messages to go through each and every day, many of them from people who were just trying to get me to look at their business opportunity.

Hmmm..... Is this just a new way of chasing people for your opportunity?? Or is this a new type of spam??

Just imagine those people who have 1000's or 10,000's of follower's how long it would take them to go through all their messages if they were genuinely following people?

The answer to that is that they can't.

SO WHAT IS THE POINT OF FOLLOWING ALL THESE PEOPLE IF YOU ARE
NOT GENUINELY INTERESTED IN HEARING WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY????

Here is an excerpt from a recent email by Mike Dillard of Magnetic Sponsoriong fame regarding the hot debate of following people on Twitter. A very well timed email if I must say so myself!! (Parts of the email have been removed just to shorten it up a bit. It has not changed or removed any of the important contant!!)

Do you follow someone just because they followed you? Or do you only follow people you genuinely know and want to follow?

I decided to "reciprocal follow" everyone who was following me about two months ago.

There are two reasons you'd want to do this....

It's polite.

It helps you gain exposure, which will help increase your number of followers.

Looking back, I'm not convinced that was the best move to make, and here's why....

"It's not the number of people who follow you on Twitter that matters, it's the number of people who are actually listen to you."

And if everyone is just "reciprocal following" everyone, not because they WANT o listen to that person, but because they're trying to increase their exposure and number of followers, then we have a problem....

Everyone's following everyone, but no one's really listening.

And it get's worse....

Once you follow 500+ people, you have to start using specialized software just to filter and manage so many message.

And if you already use specialized software like me, you've probably set up a custom sub-list of real friends so you can separate all of their messages from the masses of people you don't know.

How genuine is that?

In the end reciprocal following simply dilutes the power of an application like Twitter because it's a behavior that's motivated by greed instead of authenticity, just so we can all enjoy the illusion of having "more followers".

In the end, I feel that any true "following" you build in your life should be based in providing real value, not the perpetuation of an illusion daisy-chained from one person to the next.

Mike Dillard

Personally, I had already decided to take a similar stance as Mike (maybe not quite as harsh!). As the last few weeks have gone by I have been removing people who were not providing me with value. Also, anyone that just constantly threw their business opportunity around or just provided content that was no where near my interest got removed.

As new people choose to follow me I will look at each person individally and see what they provide. If it is of interest I will "reciprocal follow" (and there are so many of these wonderful people out there that are really there to help others)....

I just don't wish to be on someone's following list just so they can have the biggest "fan club" on Twitter.

You can view my profile and choose whether or not to follow me on Twitter by clicking here. If you choose not to I certainly won't be offended.