One of the things that makes Twitter so compelling is the ability to follows the thoughts, ideas and content of a lot of people in a very fluid and dynamic way.
But one of the challenges is figuring out who and how many people to follow. Do you follow anyone who follows you? Or do you be selective about who you follow? Do you follow as many people as possible or just a few?
There are clearly different schools of thought – just as there are/were different ways on how many RSS subscriptions you should/could have. Here’s a few options:
1. The Pragmatist: You want to consume content on Twitter but not to point of being overwhelmed. This means you follow a relatively small number of people – perhaps 10 to 50 – and ensure they fall into a few camps (personal, professional, business sectors). The people you do follow bring value to the table and easily justify having a place within your Twitter ecosystem.
There are two tricks to making this happen. First, you have to spend some time digging around to find the right people. You can do it through personal connections or through tools such as Twellow or Just Tweet It. At the same time, you do your due diligence on people following you by checking their Twitter profiles, scanning through their Tweets, and checking out their Web sites/blogs. If they meet your “standards”, follow them.
Granted, this approaches take time and energy but at the end of the day, you’re create group of followers that make Twitter a valuable tool.
2. Mr./Mrs. Happy Go Lucky: You’ve got lots of energy, passion and interests so having a lot of followers on Twitter is exciting because variety is the spice of life. If you fall into this camp, you may follow 50 to 300 people. Now, that may seem a lot but it’s pretty manageable given not everyone who you follow is using Twitter to the same extent all the time.
For my personal Twitter account, this is the approach I’ve adopted. It provides a healthy mixture of friends, professional colleagues and people who just seem interesting. I’m not following about 100 people, and could see that climbing to perhaps another 25 or so.
Again, this approach takes time because you have to do your homework by sifting through the people following you, and digging out people to follow. To be honest, it’s not uncommon for me to look through five to 10 new followers a day, and perhaps pick one to follow.
3. It’s a Party; You’re All Invited: These are people who follow 500 to 2000 people. They’re digital animals looking to extend their personal or corporate brands as far and wide as possible even if it means following people who may not be all that interesting. For them, it doesn’t matter because if it means attracting attention, that’s a small price to pay.
Some people who follow a huge number of people claim they have the ability to digest a massive amount of information. But the truth is they’re not telling the truth. They may think they can follow lots of people but it doesn’t happen. Meanwhile, other people who follow lots of people don’t even try to keep up because, frankly, it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things.
Deciding what approach to take depends on your goals and objectives, which is something you should something you should keep in mind when jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. Note: Darren Rowse has a good post on making a Twitter plan.
For more thoughts on how to follow people on Twitter, check out Shel Israel who has some personal benchmarks he follows. You can also find out who unfollows you by using Qwitter.com.
So, how do you follow. Any tricks, techniques or secrets?
Technorati Tags: twitter
18 Comments
You know, I think this is an interesting post for 3 reasons.
#1 – I’m not a pragmatist so that goes out the window.
#2 – Happy Go Lucky – solid group. They’re fun and pay close attention.
#3 – IT’s A PARTY!
I like #3 the best. Hey, it’s twitter! It’s life. You only live once. Why not try to be the best you can be to as many of God’s children as possible?
I feel like everyone has something of a “personal usefulness curve” when it comes to twitter – as they start out, they’ll have few followers and they won’t see the importance of Twitter. As they gradually follow more people and find more people following them, the value of Twitter will increase. However, at some point, they’ll be following too many people and the value will decrease. I agree with you that a manageable limit is somewhere below 300 (I try and keep the number of people I follow around 200, this includes some people who are rarely active). As someone other than myself once said, “if you have time follow 500 people, you need a job.”
Parker,
I agree that trying to follow 500 people is a huge time-suck. I think anyone who suggests they can do is perpetuating an urban myth.
I follow about 500 but I don’t fit into your #3 category. What I do is follow people I know, services I want updates from, and people whom I haven’t met personally but would like to connect with. However, I’m not able to see every tweet every person in my network creates. Twitter is like a river and when I come to it, I catch what I can and move on. I’ve set up ways to filter out some what I want to make sure I don’t miss, but I don’t feel the pressure to make sure I read every item every person posts.
Following 300+ people is no problem: you don't have to read everything all the time, but simply to "dip in the pool" when you like and use the search function smartly.
Rob Williams has a good point.
There is also the concept of “critical mass.” By that I mean, it takes a certain volume of traffic on Twitter to have enough content to find the good stuff. You can “follow” enough people to catch great nuggets of insight on occasion, but you don’t have “follow” every Tweet. (THAT would be a waste of time, at least for me.)
Before you jump to conclusions about “truth in following,” watch a few episodes of Numb3rs: lots and lots of data is not a bad thing.
I’m new on Twitter and still learning 101-type stuff. I did hope to use the Search function to apply a strategy per my professional interest (copywriting, ebook ghostwriting, publishing). However, the Search function wasn’t working.
So, I’m glad you mentioned Twellow & Just Tweet it! Which I will definitely check out.
Doubt I’ll ‘unfollow’ all those I’ve already started following, though.
Thanks!
Its rather offensive you have judged me as a person who does not care about the people I follow or who follow me. I follow and am followed by over 2000, I also answer every single @msg that I get as long as its not spam, I even go so far as to use multiple twitter clients plus feed tracking to catch any incorrect use of my twitter name so I can reply.
You have also in one fell swoop turd canned nearly ever single high end user of twitter. So I guess to sum up for you, anyone who follows to many more people than you is a spammer or just using the twitter community to further their own ends.
BTW I noticed you have over 500 people you dont care about following you on twitter. By your own admission they are not worth your time to listen to.
Also noticed you seem to link to your own websites in a rather high percentage of your tweets. I will take it from that you happen to understand the marketer and spammer mind well because ….
well you already made that point didn’t you.
Never judge unless you want to be judged, never assume you know the capacity of the minds of others. Just because you can only pay attention to a limited set of things at once, does not mean the rest of us are so shy in our ability.
Peace
Mich D
PS i will be on twitter adding every and any person who wants to follow back and talking to all of them every chance I get. Unlike yourself I don’t demand others to conform to my view, I find it more interesting and enriching to listen to every available option.
I’m a digital animal who likes to party with Twitter. I follow over 500 people now and being following back with quite good number now. I can get lots of ideas and information by following so many people. For sure I will miss something but twitter keep move on. Still lot of post waiting for me to read..
I try to keep my personal list to about 100. That seems like a good number for me to keep up with whats going on.
Business account has about 400 and that is way too much to keep up with on a daily babsis.
Great points buckpost, and I digg the “persona like” descriptions… good points in each of the comments too.
For me, I mainly use twitter just for fun, I tried to get more into it and grow with it to get more use out of it and followers, and all those social things – but I’m realizing that keeping it fun is best for me. I get a lot of great URLs and tap into the tweet-buzz every day just to see what’s going on, but I don’t want to feel like I’m missing something and have it become a time-sink…
I fall into the Happy Go Lucky category following 200 people/services at the moment. I recently went through my follows and stopped following users who either don’t interact well or simply give me no value in following them. Some of them were people I meant on other services and some were people I thought were interesting but I can only hear that you’ve just finished Ramen Noodles so many times.
I've only been on Twitter for a few months, but I'm getting pretty hooked and find a lot of useful info. Plus, there are a few friends who tweet regularly and I enjoy knowing what's up with them. But, I've been trying to figure out the whole how many to follow thing and this is the first good answer I've seen. I only follow 33, but some are pretty tweet heavy, like @problogger. Don't know how anyone could follow thousands or even hundreds. Thanks for the insight.
I have just shy of 400 that I follow.I plan to add many more.The beauty of Twitter is whether I choose to follow 1 or 1000 makes no difference.There is no penalty box if I do things a certain way or do not.My personal preference is to un-follow negative people.That being said I enjoy the endless stream of useful information,websites,reviews and everything else that makes Twitter what it is.I may not be able to catch everything but what I do see make it very much worth my time.
Mike,
One thing to remember is can take time to find the right mix of followers but when you do, Twitter is that much more useful.
Mich,
Thanks for the comment – all thoughts and insight appreciated.
Just a couple of counter points:
One, I love the fact more than 600 people follow me on Twitter as it, hopefully, says that I have something to offer.
Two, My own links that I do put on Twitter are mostly updates on new blog posts through Twitterfeed, which is a common tool. But most of the links I put on Twitter are interesting articles and Web sites that I come across.
Thanks for visiting Twitterrati. Come again and keep commenting!
Maybe we need another blog post "how to lead". I think by leading you will gain more followers and you won't have to follow so many people in order to do so.
dobesv,
That's a good idea. Watch this space!
Mark
2 Trackbacks
[...] do you follow? For some help on these questions, check out buckpost at Twitterati and the entry on How to Follow 101. This how-to advice depends on how you view your own twitter use and primarily is based on number [...]
[...] How to Follow 101 [...]