Some remarks in an answer to Jon Worth.
After this week-end at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe, Jon Worth recommends a twitter follower strategy. In shorter : you should follow people who follow you.
if someone is interested enough in you to follow you, then at least follow them back
Well, I don’t agree.
My case is simple : I have, at the time, more than 5000 followers, in which are already some followerspam and fake accounts. And also a lot of human beings, who are kind to follow men, but that I simply don’t have neither the will nor the courage to follow back.
My case is of course not a model. I am at a midst between broadcasting and real interaction with real people. I can’t juste have a conversation with thousands. The strength of weak ties goes with not too many links. I can have efficient weak ties with some 1000 people or so. 5000 is too many.
And believe me : I am being followed by people that are of no interest to me (and I am of absolute no interest to a much more larger crowd).
And, talking about respect : I prefer real social interaction, to a small and growing list of people you get to know than the automated interaction that following back automatially consists in. Twitter is a social tool : it needs to get into relation in any way.
Twitter is unequal, as a product of freely distributed attention. Power law, long tail, etc : twitter won’t be a flat world, and that’s for good.
I don’t follow back, then. But I love discovering people through twitter, identifying them, and making my network of shared interest and knowledge grow. These are some operational rules I apply to my twitter practice :
- I don’t follow people that I don’t appreciate in some way ;
- I don’t receive follower notifications anymore : just too many email with not valuable information ;
- I do a quick weekly followers check to see if anybody I know IRL I should be following is around here ;
- I use searches a lot, as a way to discover people ;
- I check back and try, as far as I can, to answer to each person who talks to me through twitter ;
- I watch who retweets me, as they should be interesting people
- Every few weeks, I get into cleaning my following list, unfollowing loads of people I have understood we don’t have anything in common, or who are to prolific.
This is for managing my contacts.
As for what I say, I still apply the basic rule I used when I was blogging on versac.net : say what you wnt and interests you, at the time you do it. People have to get to it, or not listen. This why I tweet quite a lot about what I drink (wine), my current mood, or strange discovers on american political blogs, even though people who follow me – mainly french - think they are listening to a political blogger.
As I have the busy agenda of an entrepreneur, I can’t spend my day twittering like a french desk journalist, in between one or two “batonnage de dépêche”. Being somewhat addicted, though, I use twitter as a respiration, between stuff. In between meetings, or tasks, in a taxi, when waiting at the airport, and so. Following 400 or so people makes it easy, and interesting : I both always discover something interesting, and identify who is linking to what.
These are two cents about twitter : be genuine. Don’t force into interaction if you don’t like, and don”t fake relations. After all, it’s all about that : creating human links between real people.
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Excuse my english, back to french in a few days.
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