Are You READING The Tweets of Those YOU Follow?
Hey peeps! An awful lot of people using twitter want their "followees" to reciprocate and become their followers in turn. (And not because they're interested to read their tweets or personal life details.)
So I chirp, "what's the point of following and being followed, if no one pays much attention to the tweets?"
For those of you entering via search engine, please review my personal twitter policy:
300 - that's my self-imposed limit for the number of people I follow on twitter. There are some social media "authorities" who recommend capping the number at 150. I find that 300 is very manage-able (for me) considering the mix of people whose tweets I care about.
There are 5 main groups of people using twitter:
(1) People and companies trying to make money tweeting a re-tweeting
example:
(2) People who perceive twitter as some sort of mass popularity contest (this includes "pretend celebrities" along with the subset of those who follow as many people as they can hoping the ones that they followed have autosoftware installed that follows back; after a week they scrub their list with software that removes all the ones who followed them during that period. So they followed , let's say, 500 and 275 followed them back... they then UNfollow the all 500 and start over, but they have netted 275 "followers" who are unlikely to notice they've been undollowed)
(3) People who use twitter as if it were AOL Instant Messenger (or glorified 'texting')
(4) People who use twitter properly: for communciation, announcements, information-sharing etc. (It's okay to have two or three ads and a few re-tweets every now and then... but not 10 every hour!)
(5) People who sign up, tweet a few times, and then go inactive.
"Active Twitter users practice a selective reading policy – we can tell by peripherally glancing at most tweets if we want to read them or not. It’s a matter of who’s doing the tweeting, if we see a link or a quote inside and the keywords that pop out at us. If people don’t want to read a tweet with links, they don’t."
Tags: twitter following techniques, twitter followers
Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and Dave Lucas are properly cited. Permission to reprint any comments below is granted only for those comments written by Dave Lucas and staff.
Michael Fortin has addressed a couple of my pet net peeves: #1 is
Fake networking on twitter and facebook :::
Fake networking on twitter and facebook :::
Just like Twitter said when they dumped auto-follow from their native application:
“It is unlikely that any one can actu ally read tweets from thou sands of accounts which makes this activ ity disingenuous.”
Even Seth Godin calls mass-friending as “fake networking.” This applies to Facebook as much as it does to Twitter — or to any other social media application, for that matter.
(1) People and companies trying to make money tweeting a re-tweeting
example:
(2) People who perceive twitter as some sort of mass popularity contest (this includes "pretend celebrities" along with the subset of those who follow as many people as they can hoping the ones that they followed have autosoftware installed that follows back; after a week they scrub their list with software that removes all the ones who followed them during that period. So they followed , let's say, 500 and 275 followed them back... they then UNfollow the all 500 and start over, but they have netted 275 "followers" who are unlikely to notice they've been undollowed)
(3) People who use twitter as if it were AOL Instant Messenger (or glorified 'texting')
(4) People who use twitter properly: for communciation, announcements, information-sharing etc. (It's okay to have two or three ads and a few re-tweets every now and then... but not 10 every hour!)
(5) People who sign up, tweet a few times, and then go inactive.
"Active Twitter users practice a selective reading policy – we can tell by peripherally glancing at most tweets if we want to read them or not. It’s a matter of who’s doing the tweeting, if we see a link or a quote inside and the keywords that pop out at us. If people don’t want to read a tweet with links, they don’t."
Tags: twitter following techniques, twitter followers
Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and Dave Lucas are properly cited. Permission to reprint any comments below is granted only for those comments written by Dave Lucas and staff.
