To Follow or Be Followed: A Twitter Story
I’ve been using Twitter now for almost a year and while I do admit I was a bit late to the party, I know plenty well how the social media juggernaut can benefit users on both a professional and personal level. Businesses have been using the juggernaut micro-blogging web service as a means to get the word out about new or updated products, upcoming events and so much more, while every-day people are using Twitter to let the world know what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and anything else they might think you would want to know. It seems like a serious waste of time, maybe, but we live in a society where people need to be heard, recognized, seen. We’re not all celebrities but we can feel at least a little more like we matter, even if we don’t.
One of the big issuess amongst the Twitter elite is the debate over whether it is better to be followed by many, or to be followed by few. The argument goes something like this…
Lots of Twitter Followers is Good!
This camp believes having a large amount of Twitter followers is a good thing because it gives your voice an opportunity to be heard by a greater audience. The greater the following, the wider the audience, the more exposure you or your cause will likely receive as a result. It makes sense, really. Then what’s the problem?
A large Twitter following definitely is good in the sense that you have a much greater audience with which to work. However, it’s very likely that a significant chunk of your followers haven’t given much thought to following you, and aren’t really going to care about what you have to say. You may think you’re Pete Cashmore, but you might actually be more like that crazy guy near Times Square, preaching about the End of Days.
Twitter is About Quality, Not Quantity
This is a more refined approach to Twitter where you focus on having a high-quality list of hand-picked followers, people you know are going to care about what you’re saying. Targeting your followers take a lot more time and effort than accepting all takers, and you’ll likely spend a lot of time weeding out those Twits who wreak of spam, bot, or any other unsavory quality or purpose you don’t want to be involved with. You can still amass a lot of Twitter followers with this more detailed approach but you should plan to spend more time making sure your followers are on the up-and-up.
Don’t get me wrong, you can have success on Twitter no matter which way you decide to go. I will say that the first approach to gaining followers on Twitter, the sort of catch-all approach, usually results in you having a lot of followers since people sometimes unfollow you if you don’t return the favor by a certain deadline. I personally think this really takes a lot of the fun out of Twitter and it also serves to destroy whatever followers feed you’ve got set up. At the end of the day, however, both methods are acceptable and it really just comes down to what kind of Twit you want to be.
