Who do I Follow on Twitter?
I generally don’t pay attention to who follows me on Twitter. In fact, I have GMail automatically archive Twitter email notifications whenever someone new follows me. That bucket currently has 700+ unread messages. (I just checked so I could put a number in that sentence.)
This offends some people. They believe that by following you, you should in turn follow them back. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Twitter is weird like that.
So how do I decide who to follow? I generally follow these groups of people:
- People I work with or know personally.
- People who are well known in fields I’m interested in, like Android development.
- Familiar names that keep popping up on Twitter among the people I already follow.
- People who @reply to me with interesting comments.
More and more, that last bullet is how I choose who to follow. If someone sparks my interest with a comment, I’ll click their profile and check out their time line and bio. If I like what I see, I’ll follow. It’s as simple as that.
Un-Follow
If people spend a lot of time tweeting about religion, teabagging, or other things I don’t like, I silently un-follow. That stuff stresses me out, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of Twitter. For me, Twitter is a way to relieve stress and amuse myself.
Speaking of un-following, there are tools to notify you when someone un-follows. Last year someone (who I don’t know) send me a personal email telling me he was un-following me. It’s OK, really. You don’t need to tell people when you leave, just go away.
I believe people should not concern themselves with un-follows. Sanitizing your thoughts and censoring yourself is a great way to be boring on Twitter. Instead, just be yourself and have fun.
Great post, and I completely agree with you. I also don’t follow people that tweet more than about 10 times a day. I just can’t keep up with that. I wish there was a way to tell twitter that I don’t want to see stuff from certain people unless it’s relevant to another conversation I’m following or something like that. I know that would be hard to code, but it would be better!
I also avoid people who tweet between midnight and 6:00 am. I figure while I’m sleeping, I don’t want to know what you are doing
. Even some service tweeters (like sports and weather tweets) sometimes post in the middle of the night. I understand bandwidth, and tweets from different time zones, but if it wakes me up, I at least remove it from updating on my phone.
I generally take a look at the time-line of anyone that follows me. You generally WON’T get my follow if your bio is trying to talk me into following you or your time line is all about how your making money, and how you’re going to help me make it too. I also look at how many people you’re following. When that number starts to get large, I know you’re not interacting with the people you’re following, you’re stalking the next sucker. Of course I could be wrong about all of this.
<wink>
Agree wholeheartedly on both counts. There is no reciprocal obligation to Follow. And un-following is such a non-event, it should be like unsubscribing from a newsletter.
I have very much the same follow/unfollow policies as you’ve listed, with the additional thought that “just because I unfollow you on Twitter doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to you in real life.” Some people just don’t translate well from live to written- not a judgement, just an observation. If I unfollow, it means your stream wasn’t doing it for me; nothing more.