I recently joined Twitter (@jrberger86 in case your wondering). And I have gained many followers, which I guess is good. (I do have many strong and heartfelt opinions, political and otherwise, as you may already know.) The only thing is, every time some member pops up in my email, that piques my interest, I immediately follow them, often without even giving it that much thought. In fact, I am presently following many cannabis users, even though I personally never use the substance (but strongly believe it still should be legalized, FWIW).
Is following so many people (now in the hundreds–poss. even thousands [I kid you not]) such a good idea? I guess now they will all be sending me Tweets, most of which I may not even bother reading, due to volume.
Is this all a good idea? What do the rest of you think (or do yourselves, for that matter)?
Probably not a factual answer to this. Reported to move it to IMHO
And, IMHO…there’s nothing inherently wrong with following a lot of people. There are a lot of people on Twitter who feel it’s only fair that if they follow you, you follow them back. So if you want a lot of followers you need to follow a lot.
Personally I would not be able to stand following a lot of people. I follow 90 right now, and half of them rarely post (they are athletes). I only want to follow people who tweet about Cleveland Indians’ games during the games. I have no use for anyone else. I also have no use for anyone who live-tweets the games because I am listening to the game! So I just have the 90 people and that’s it. I have almost 400 followers, so I don’t follow everyone who follows me.
If you feel like you need to follow people back when they follow you, you can follow then put them on “mute” to keep their posts out of your feed, I believe. Then you don’t have to feel bad about not following them but you don’t have to see them.
If you want to cull your list - do it! But you won’t know who you want to exclude until you include them first
Some people follow whoever follows them, including the spambots. That makes both numbers really big. But it does give their feed a general sense of what’s going on, rather than as some kind of entertainment or socialising hub. I suspect the people who follow thousands aren’t actually reading their feed, and don’t really “get” Twitter.
Following anything over 500 people is probably a bit unwieldy (unless you’re adept at making lists, separating them into smaller groups) but under 500 is manageable.
I am judicious about who I follow and try to clear out the spambots as much as possible. My numbers are low, but it makes it a great place for tiny conversations while still absorbing the high points of the day’s news.
You can no longer send PMs to people you don’t follow or who don’t follow you - so that’s one reason to co-follow each other. If you’re not interested in that, don’t do it - it gets unwieldy.
You should also decide what it is you want from Twitter - do you want to use it to communicate with people you know? Do you want to use it primarily as a news aggregator? Are you trying to disseminate information in a particular field/area of expertise? All have their uses (some much more useful than others), and each have their own set of preferences/settings to make that easier to accomplish.
