27 Apr When Does the Act of Following Someone on Twitter Become Meaningless?
Posted at 06:00h
in Twitter
Following makes the world go round. At least, on Twitter it does. But as much as we talk about engaging and connecting and conversing, and as much as we repeat the mantra that ‘numbers don’t matter on Twitter’ to our clients, over the last few days I’ve started to wonder whether the act of following someone really means anything to the serious Twitter user.
Since I started taking Twitter seriously on a personal level a few months back, both my follower numbers and the number of people I follow have been rising steadily. I take an organic approach to my account – I don’t trawl Twitter lists or other people’s followers looking for people to follow in the hope that they’ll follow me back, preferring instead to discover interesting people via conversations I observe or take part in on blogs, Twitter itself and, sometimes, LinkedIn. I’m pretty choosy about who I follow and who I follow back; I look at biographies to check areas of interest and I read recent tweets. I look for people who will add something to my professional life and, as a result, of the thousands of people I’ve encountered, I currently follow less than 550.
The attention on Twitter is always on follower numbers – people who follow you. But in contrast, it was when I followed my 500th person that I had something of an epiphany. One that, I suspect, may be a little controversial to some. It dawned on me that the more people you follow on Twitter, the more meaningless the act of doing so becomes.
When I first started out on Twitter and followed my first 100 people, I noticed each of them and read what they had to say. I started to build relationships with them. But as the number has grown, any given individual’s influence on me has become less and less as their relative share of my Twitter stream has dwindled. Many of my contacts follow far more people than me as they’ve been around Twitter longer – three, five or ten times as many. Some follow tens of thousands of people. So I wonder, while when following 100 people each new contact is potentially significant, does it actually mean anything to follow someone else when you already follow 1500 or 3000 or 10,000 people?
Perhaps even more to the point, how do you differentiate between 1500 people? How do you follow what all of these people have to say and engage/connect/converse with them? It’s hard enough with 500 people and, even with tools such as Seesmic, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, which enable you to divide people into lists and columns for easier tracking, this would seem like an impossible task. And I wonder whether Dunbar’s number is as prevalent on Twitter as it (rather scarily) appears to be in every other social situation? Does everyone in Twitter have a core group of 50, 100 or 150 people with whom they have relationships, after which following more people becomes, if not pointless, then at least largely insignificant or irrelevant?
This post is full of questions for which I have no answers. So over to you – what do you think and how honest are you feeling?! How many people do you follow, do you give much thought to who you follow/follow back, and do you think it’s actually possible to engage all of them? Do you even want to?!
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