Twitter: No follow?
Ah, yes… time for another post about… TWITTER!
Aren’t some of us spending inordinate amounts of time there? I was at a conference with Carrie Wilkerson–the Barefoot Executive, who has like 52,000+ followers, and I thought she was going to wear out the keys on her Blackberry, I swear. She’s amazing.!
I’m lucky if I get to tweet a few times a day, and really feel inadequate there to be sure. But I try to offer blog posts and such to help people along the way, as well as retweeting cool stuff and communicating with the followers on my list and the people whom I follow. ‘Course I follow just about everyone that follows me. Why not? It’s only respectful. The only ones I don’t follow have no avatar and are obviously trying to scam the Twitterverse.
And then, there are those who follow you and then, unfollow you right away just to build their Twitter list. That’s really sleazy, in my book. And I used to hunt
those people down and unfollow them back. Sheesh. It’s what they deserve, right?
But it’s nearly impossible. Qwitter works sometimes. I’ll get a whole bunch of emails for a day or so from Qwitter, and then, pffft!!! NAda. I’m hoping that nobody is being an ass, but somehow, I’m thinking not. There will always be as many asses as there are chairs and you just have to run into one every now and then, right?
But to track them manually?
Here’s the thing: You can’t trust Twitter! When it looks like there are a bunch of people who aren’t following you, it might just be that they are following you and that Twitter is messing things up. Unfollowing them will do you a world of hurt People who are following you don’t like it when you unfollow them. They take it as a personal affront.
And, you can’t use the services that tell you who the people are who aren’t following you back. They mess up because Twitter messes up, and tell you so in their terms of service.
What’s the solution?
Even though it might piss you off, you have to go about your business and just not worry at all about the people not following you back! It really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, sure… it would be nice to nuke the nasties off the face of the planet, but there are just too many things to do in a typical entrepreneurial day, right?
The moral is: Don’t waste your time worrying about who’s following you or not following you. Use Twitter for the fun application that it is, and make lots of friends that are interested in the same things as you are. That’s really what’s important and what will keep your Twitterverse clean and clear. Just Tweet away and ignore the rest. There just aren’t enough moments in the day.
Harvey Stoppe
May 12th, 2009 at 10:59 am #
Thanks for writing this. I have been fretting over the last week about what I should do with my followers/followed ratio, and you writing this has really set my mind at ease. Good work.
Web Hosting Art
May 12th, 2009 at 12:26 pm #
When I first heard about Twitter I thought that it was one of the worst ideas in which a new web 2.0 company is based. During time, Twitter became more and more featured rich and has gained a noticeable portion of social networking. Nowadays almost every large website has an active Twitter account. Contrary I still don’t understand why we have to inform everyone on what we are doing every minute. It is so important? Are people so Internet addicted? All this information is not valuable. I think that I am a little monolithic…
Palm Beach
July 30th, 2009 at 1:21 pm #
I had an almost 10 to 1 ratio of people I was following to people who followed me in the beginning. Then once I got over the initial learning curve I cut it back to about a 2 to 1 ratio as many of my friends followed me as I followed them. I don;t care too much for the twitter spam many of the top twitters deliver anyway.