The Reciprocators
These are the guys like Robert Scoble who just reciprocate all follower requests they get. Now, the problem with this is you don’t really know who you are following. If 20,000 people decide to follow me that’s great but do I have to follow them? Of course not, there are a lot of folks on twitter who create a lot of noise. Folks that like to share every detail of their life or every event. Do I want to know what you are eating? Not really. Follow people that you want to engage in conversation with or folks that you have a genuine interest in. Now too be fair it can also be argued that folks like Scoble are just interested in EVERYONE, point noted.
The Spammers and Attention Whores
These are the folks that go around trying to follow as many people as they can in hopes that the “follow” will be reciprocated. A lot of these twitter users are spammers that haven’t figure out the utility of twitter. Others are just blatant attention seekers who are trying to get as many twitter followers as they can. The problem with this approach is that the focus is on quantity and not quality. The spammers want as many followers a possible so that they can begin pushing out their content. There is limited quality discussion and interaction here.
The Minimalists or Conversationalists
These are the guys that are pretty conservative with whom they follow. I would most likely group myself in this category. I want to follow people who provide some sort of value or interesting discussion, this doesn’t mean that if I’m not following you I don’t think you’re interesting, it just means that I am trying to keep my follow limit to a relatively small number so I don’t have to skip and chase tweets. I also do this so that I can engage in quality discussions and interactions with people, there is just no way to do this when you are following everyone. Take for example Loren Feldman, recently he “un-followed” almost all of his followers because he said he wanted to engage in actual discussions, this means that he will only talk to you if you use the ‘@’ to send him a reply. Personally this strikes me a very 1 way discussion, meaning it’s a “I will talk to you if you talk to me first” approach. Kevin Rose also has a very limited amount of people that he follows, despite being one of the most followed twitter users with around 50,00 followers.
What other types of twitter follower groups woud you add to this? Did I miss anything?
Thanks for reading
As we see micro-blogging pop up, I think we are really getting a sense of the nature of humanity itself. There is a lot of revealing information about human beings themselves in this post that transcends Twitter.
How about the Twitter users that are Following only to gleen a bit of genius from their target? I’d say about 45% Kevin Rose and Scoble followers fall into this category, while another 45% just want to be able to brag that they follow someone cool.
I agree with michael – a lot of people follow others, not to engage in conversation, but to glean information, find new trends, and find info to pass on.
Some of the people I follow are people I like to chat with, others are people I like to learn from, and yet others are people I just like to keep an eye on 😉
I recently asked my followers why they followed me (I only have 200 or so but I wanted to know) and most of the said they follow because they like my articles and like the tips I Tweet.
Unfortunately no-one said they followed me because i was cool 🙁
Great take on explaining the Twitter-verse! I especially like the conversationalists and people who provide URLs to helpful content or respond when I post a question. I try to do the same in return.
Happy Twittering =)
@daniel
twitter definitely becomes a “little black book” type of platform.
@michael
good point, the twitter followers who want to “learn.” However if you look at their “following” pattern would you not consider these people minimalists or converstionalists? perhaps i should expand the definition
@nikki
well since you’re reading this blog you’re cool in my book 🙂 it’s not the quantity of followers you have but the quality of the discussions, that matters.
@Alex
I try to do the same as well, it’s important to be able to provide value to the followers.
thanks everyone for commenting and for reading, hope to hear from all of you again soon.
Nikki Pilkington beats me to it.
well nonetheless, thanks for reading and for taking the time to comment!
Twitter is so cool. I love the way disqus mixes the 2 so well Twitter is awesome. 😉 moretwittertraffic.com
Twitter is so cool. I love the way disqus mixes the 2 so well Twitter is awesome. 😉 moretwittertraffic.com
i think im a minimalist
It’s actually informative stuff. I really prefer to read.There is a lot of helpful information about the twitter followers within your post…..Hope to learn rather a lot and have a pleasant experience here!Thanks for post. my best regards guys!
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