How Many to Follow?

One of the trends I’ve noticed over the last year is people whose following numbers are about as impressive as their followed by numbers. I’ve never messed around with auto-following, and in principle, I don’t think it’s wrong, but at some point I believe there is a maximum number of people one can legitimately say that they are “following”. I think my current number is about 800, and I’m beginning to feel I’m not doing most of them any favor by missing most of their tweets as my timeline rips past me.

I supposed we’re all on here to “market” something. Even if it’s just to meet new people, we’re kind of marketing ourselves. Some, on the other hand, are all about marketing some product or service (most of my new followers, lately), and their following/follower numbers reflect an effort to broadcast as widely as they can. I’m going to suggest that if you follow 16,879 people, you’re probably going to miss that tweet from your sister inviting you to her kid’s birthday party.

One of the side effects of this proliferation of following numbers is as follows: You wake up in the morning, send out a tweet saying that you’re doing pretty well, then, trickling in over the next couple of hours, you’ll receive tweets from followers saying “How are you today?” Well, I’ve already said how I was today, right? The underlying problem is that some people use this mini-blog system as a sort of souped up messaging service/chat program. But I suspect the real problem is that they are just following too many people to see your morning tweet.

Twitter was originally designed to network small groups of people, like a project team at a company, so that everybody could see updates on everyone else’s activity. I don’t think one thought was given to celebrities who garner millions of followers, or marketers who follow hundreds of thousands of people. At this point, there’s not much difference between this and email spam (and tweets from them are probably treated about the same).
There are no rules in Twitter. You can use it however you want to. And I suppose that’s the beauty of the thing, as it allows for constant evolution. But the next time your Aunt Minnie wonders why you’re snubbing her on Twitter, you might look at your following number.

Later.

Jim