I was late to the Twitter bandwagon. I thought it was stupid, useless, and a waste of time. I was wrong - 1500 “tweets” later and I think Twitter is a fun application and also useful for building relationships.
First, what is networking? Seth Godin gives a better definition than I could and says it basically comes down to helping people achieve their goals. He specifically mentions the number of followers you have on Twitter being useless. I agree - I don’t really care how many people follow me.
My strategy with Twitter is to keep the number of people I follow small. Right now I follow 52 people and I recently unfollowed about 15 people. I do not care if they are offended - most of them were “social media experts” who are “hyper twitterers” and constantly hyping useless links or people who had let their accounts go dormant. I never, ever do a “reciprocal follow.” I keep the number of people I follow small for two reasons:
- I do not have the ability to care about what hundreds of people have to say or what they’re doing, so I don’t pretend to care by following hundreds of people.
- I only follow people who I know or have an interest in (i.e. I know Paul, he encouraged me to write this post, and I am interested in what Lance Armstrong is doing even though I don’t know him personally, so I follow them both).
People who are following 20,000+ people are kidding themselves if they think that they are “networking.” Those people don’t give a shit about you and you definitely don’t give a shit about them - I can barely keep up with 52 people. I believe some people can keep up with 150 people, maybe even 300, but 20,000? You look like a social media expert, which is a synonym for dumbass.
Following People Should Make Them Feel Special
If I notice someone new followed me I usually go check out their Twitter stream. A lot of times I notice that I am the 3,394th person they have followed - I am just a number in their online network. But if I am 1 of 50, or 1 of 100, even if I am 1 of 200 people being followed, I feel “important” to them - I feel like they think I offer something of value. Is it always true? Nope. But the ability to make someone feel special with one click is powerful, and if you follow thousands of people you lose that power.
Twitter is Actually Useful (and Fun)
So I have this network - small, yes, but smart and personal - on Twitter. Lets say I want to know if anyone has any advice on a design I finished for my website…all I do is write the question, post it to Twitter, and I get 5-10 quick comments.
I make sure to interact with the people I follow as much as is reasonable. Do I respond to their every tweet? Of course not. But if they ask a question about a topic I know a lot about I will happily tell them what I think. My Twitter stream is a network of consultants, all willing to give 140 characters of advice for free. All I have to do is provide advice when I know the answers and everyone is happy.
I like Twitter because it requires a relatively low amount of maintenance but keeps you in the “front” of people’s minds. It’s kind of like buying someone a cup of coffee, but without the hassle of actually buying them a cup of coffee. They know you’re there, they know what you’re interested in, but you don’t have to call them every day. Perfect.
Lets not forget the most important part of Twitter: it’s for fun. If you join Twitter expecting to build business relationships by acting and talking like a “business person”, I will not be following you - not because what you have to say isn’t valuable, but because I can go find it somewhere else. I am not on Twitter to learn lessons about business, I am there to have fun and keep up with friends, clients, and acquaintances in a less formal atmosphere.
My Twitter Rules
- Don’t follow people because they followed you.
- It is okay to offend people and unfollow them. Maybe they’ll get the hint that they’re boring.
- Don’t use Twitter like instant messenger - if you can’t get it out in 140 characters, send an email or write a blog post.
- Don’t follow more people than you can keep up with. No one believes you can keep up with 20,000 people.
I’m sure there are more, anyone care to add to the list?
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* Don’t get upset when I don’t follow you back, it looks childish and gives me one more reason not to follow.
I agree that your twitter network should remain small and personal. Good points here, Ben.
I struggle a lot of times with the number of people I follow. I usually go through and purge the people I follow once a month, but generally suck at it. I’m at 140+ right now, and ideally I’d like to be around 100. I see a lot of people following 200-300 people, and quite frankly I just don’t see how that’s even possible. At 140 (with probably 10-20 services/bots that don’t post often) I feel overwhelmed.
My new strategy is that if you piss me off a lot or I don’t share enough in common, I’m just going to unfollow you. Seems to be working pretty well for me.
However, I do monitor all of my @replies and will answer anyone who asks me questions whether I follow them or not.
Unless it is a service or a piece of s/w I use, I will not follow a company. I didn’t follow any politicians in the last few months either, I can get all those updates from CNN or the office water cooler.
Who I do follow are people I know and who know me. The only exception to this (and admittedly the largest group) is people I will allow to be a good influence to me as I believe they may have something valuable to offer in my attempt to reach new achievements. So do I follow the likes of Matt Mullenweb or Jeffrey Zeldman? Hella Yeah! Twitter provides a means to see how successful people in one’s particular industry are inside and outside of the office.
Surely there’s some kind of rule about excessive tweeting/re-tweeting. I never realized how many people lack the ability to self-censor until I joined twitter.
About a year ago I was only following about 100 people, despite having 1000 or so followers, because that felt good to me and it was manageable.
However, over the last few months in particular, I’ve found I’ve been able to mentally deal with significantly more somehow. Don’t ask me how or why. But.. Twitter has suddenly become a lot more amazing and useful to me. I now follow about 500 people and the amazing insights and sheer variety of people never ceases to inspire me now. So.. I think following more people is a great thing, as long as you develop the mindset for it to be a powerful tool and not information overload.
“You look like a social media expert, which is a synonym for dumbass.”
The most awesome social media quote that I’ve ever heard.
I am just starting to experiment with Twitter and this advice could not be more timely and useful. Good rules/suggestions to follow…thanks!
well you can’t tell anyone to do things right these day , can’t you ?
if they did follow thousands of people
I think they still consider in social networking, well maybe not the kind of social networking that you had in mind.
Like you, I’m new and late to Twitter for the same reasons. I thought I’d try it as a way to build community around my soon-to-be blog. Right away I saw that there were people who seemingly did nothing but Twitter all day long. I’m heading over to unfollow a few people now. There’s only so many hours in the day . . .
Its amazing how i respond to other peoples tweets, yet they dont bother with mine. The reason being, is that they are only adding tweets and not actually reading, you can check this by looking at the tweets.
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I am just starting to experiment with Twitter and this advice could very useful for me. ….thanks!