My Twitter following philosophy

Image courtesy of Chris Wallace

I see and use Twitter as a tool to communicate with friends and like minded people, I do not use it to blindly market to or push my thoughts and opinions to people who probably don’t care about anything I do or think. To that end here is a quick commentary of what my Twitter “following” philosophy is all about.

1. I will only follow you if you you have a Bio on Twitter and/or link to your website which shows you have something to offer that I may find interesting

2. I will never follow more than a 400-500 people, otherwise I will never be able to keep track of who is doing/saying what

3. I do not expect people that I follow to follow me back

4. If you follow me, don’t expect me to follow back just because you follow me, see #1 above

Ok let me explain these a bit more

1. I do not follow people blindly, keeping up with folks on Twitter takes time and effort, so I am going to be selective on who I follow and why I follow them. The folks I am mostly interested in following are those that have useful information to share in those areas in which I have a keen interest in. These are, photography, wildlife, the environment, and technology, specially mobile technology. If you are posting on Twitter about your passion for spinning yarn, I am happy for you, but honestly I am not that interested. If you are just trying to get me to follow you in order to bombard me with your latest marketing messages forget it; there is NO chance I will follow you, no matter how many times you unfollow me and follow me again to get Twitter to send me a message to tell me you are following me. I get dozens of those a week.

When I get a message from Twitter telling me I have a new follower, I will always check out the profile of this person, and if I notice that you are following 6,562 people and have 4,364 followers, chances are pretty much 100% I will NOT follow you. To make that point clearer if you are following more people than are following you, chances are good that you have little to offer.

2. I make an effort to read the messages from folks whom I follow, after all why else follow them if I am not interested in what they have to say? Following people takes time and effort and that is why I only follow people whom I genuinely have an interested in what they have to say. I am currently following 407 people, and if I had to guess only about 100 of these folks posts to Twitter on a daily basis, it takes me between 30 to 60 minutes a day to keep up with this flow of information. This is about as much as I can dedicate to Twitter in a day without it affecting my work. Luckily, I have found that Twitter has replaced my daily sessions on NetNewsWire keeping up with all the RSS feeds, yet Twitter is much more interesting to me than following the RSS feeds because Twitter enables me to have a two-way conversation!

3. It would be stupid, naive and egotistical to “demand” that the people that I follow in turn follow me. I see so many people posting on Twitter “Today I am unfollowing all of those who are not following me”, how stupid! Learn to recognize that some people will be providing you information that you find valuable and informative, and be grateful that this person is providing this information to you. If they are not, why did you follow them in the first place? But just as important, do not ASSUME that YOU have information that this person would find useful.

4. Well this one should be self explanatory based on #3.

I am not, by far, a Twitter “celebrity”; while I do have over 500 followers, that number pales on comparison to other who have thousands if not tens of thousands of followers, but honestly I don’t care to have that many followers. As opposed to @GuyKawasaki (whom I DO follow by the way) I do believe in quality vs. quantity in my Twitter experience, but then again we have different goals for our Twitter experience. If you want to read Guys post on this, take a look here http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/12/how-to-use-twit.html.

What is your Twitter following philosophy?

You can always follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jpons but only if you think I provide information you find valuable.