It seems that like the rest of the world who is going Twitter crazy it is rubbing off on many of my clients who are also getting hung up on Twitter and like most of us, when we started using Twitter, they all have the same OLD question ..
What does Twitter Do?
Well, the questions continue and now they are getting rather interesting. A while ago I was asked in a gathering of newbie Tweets..
Does it Matter Who Follows You and Who You Follow?
Followers
I have been studying this for sometime now and the answer is mixed. Yes, it does matter if you care for you image online and No, it doesn’t matter if you don’t care.
In the cases where most of the people who are following someone are scammers, schemers and predators, then Yes it makes a big difference who is following you. If you are a scammer, scheme or predator, then No it doesn’t matter how many people you follow or are following. Matter of fact if you are one of the SSP I am surprise you stopped by for a read.
From what I have gathered I would say that well over 50% of the people, places and things that are following everyone are following for malicious reasons.
The principle behind why someone follows someone else is suppose to be based on being interested in what the person they are following has to say about things. However, out here in La-La-Land the purpose over 90% of the Tweets I studied are out here is to get as many people a they can to follow them and could give a frig about what they have to say.
Fortunately, the other 50% are people who at sometime found what the person they are following had to say. Unfortunately, over 80% of them will become bored in a few days and find what the person they are following has to say as not interesting. These followers generally will move off to TweetDeck or other Twitter services that nozzle down the fire hose of Tweets to only REALLY follow a few dozen people out of the tens of thousands they have farmed.
The questions then becomes..
Why have thousands of people Following you if they are really not Interested in what you have to say?
From the physiologist and the experts in human behavior I talk to, a person can probably communicate effectively online with around 100 people over an short period of time. That number could possibly go to 500 if there is a database they can quickly referenced that will remind them who someone is they are communicating with.
Of course add in the Twitter Coefficient (the amount of people who where kicked off Twitter or abandoned Twitter after following thousands of people) and maybe 1000 Tweets Following someone would be a workable Following. After that the value of having more than 1000 Followers is worthless. Even in a marketing sense where you use Twitter to promote yourself or anything to those Following is not effective. Out of 10,000 people who Follow someone less than .00003% or someone who gives a crap about what that person they Follow posted.
So the rhetorical question now becomes..
What value is it to having tens of thousands of people following you?
Of course the vast majority of Tweets use Twitter for vanity purposes..being popular or that need to be wanted. That same feeling that was part of everyone’s adolesants ..which pretty well describes the age group of the majority of the population of Twitterville.
Following
As far as who someone Follows, it absolutely has impact on the total experience of Twitter. What value does following someone who only post links off to web-sites that offer nothing of real value? None.
Why would you want to follow the same person who is following you if they have no interest in you other than you are another notch on their tally sheet of tens of thousands of people they are following?
The pretense of why anyone would follow anyone else on twitter (or anywhere for that matter)is based on common interests. There are incidences where difference in interests is a common interest, but that gets into insanity which I will leave for another blog. However, insanity must be a factor in why so many people feel the need to follow tens of thousands of people on Twitter.
It is a fact, there are more people on Twitter than anyone can fathom. Following 100 thousand Tweets is well within a possibility. But what is the value of following more people than humanly be communicated with in any manor? You can follow a million on Twitter. However, if none of them follow back then your communications posted on Twitter truly are not read by anyone you are following. OH they may run across the post if they are doing a word search and that word was used, but other than that the post was just flushed down the Twitter toilet with the millions of others that nobody reads.
The same statistics on how many people a person can physically communicate with who follows them are the same as the stats on following someone. Out here in Twitterville the number games are predominantly based on marketing plans. The reasons to obtain Followers is to have an harbored market to pump advertising to. The assumption most all Tweets have is the more Followers they have the more possibility there is to getting someone to buy something . However, in reality the promotions fall well below the viewer levels an ad on a Niche Business Web-site would produce. True the cost is effective, but you get what you pay for out here which has little value.
The real value of communicating with Following anyone is in the response. In order to get a response you have to follow someone who is going to follow back. To get a response that person has to be interested in what is said. Sooo..if a person is interested in what you are saying then they trust that you are going to say more about the things that interest them. Aaaah,,,the old trust factor. Now we are talking about something of value.
Bottomline:
To sum all this up, the only value of Following anyone on Twitter is to share something of interest. The only reason someone should Follow someone is for the same reason. Theoretically the numbers of Followers and Following should be near the same. The goal should be to push for a response since a response initiates the first level of entry to building trust. In today’s social and business environment, if someone is not trustworthy then the value of communication is diminished. That trustworthiness should also reflect worthiness of being Followed or for Following someone.
There are a lot of reasons people use Twitter, but on the most part Twitter does not provide any value unless you create the value..at least that is what I suggest to people on how to use Twitter.
Thanks for showing this to me via Twitter., Scot. I do believe that Twitter has become a vanity plate, but because the streams are sooo clogged..it’s now quality instead of quantity. It seems the more I followed, the more the quality went down.
Daily,
Your more than welcome. Just for the record, I picked your post up on Amplify.com and not Twitter. Just shows you that there are better platforms to find useful information.
Yes, Twitter has got itself into a situation where it will slowly die of strangulation from the millions of worthless posts being tweeted. Quality content has diminished which is very unfortunate since I have been there since the beginning and made a lot of friends. It just comes down to where is ones time spent best. Hope to see you on Facebook where at least the posts can be controlled by who you become friends with.