Ahh Twitter. Once a web 2.0 haven for the geeks and tech savvy is now the mainstream phenomenon of 2009. Everyone has a twitter account. Your mom has one, your bank, your apartment complex, your professor, CNN, and everyone. This is actually a good thing. The more information that can be amassed in the stream, the more likely it is that you, the user, will find the information you need.
Twitter is good for that, or at least it used to be. Everyone is on Twitter and therefore if you aren’t on Twitter you are missing out on resources that everyone else is taking advantage of. But you are already on Twitter, because everyone is on Twitter.
Here is the problem: A major trend in the “Twitterverse” is this follow-if-followed rule. Basically it is rude not to follow someone if they follow you. I take major issue with this. You will see that a vast majority of the people who follow you are following about 1000 more people than are following them, and they are in the 10,000 or so of range of both. This is because they look for people to follow who they know will follow them back, as is customary today, and they are always a bit ahead of the re-follwing curve, thus less followers than people they follow. There are even websites devoted to finding for you the individuals who are most likely to follow you back. So they just go following and following random people, which at the end of the day equates to more followers for them.
But is this really a good use for Twitter? Here is the reality: when someone like this follows you they have absolutely no interest in you, what you have to say, or what you might contribute back to the community. They are looking to pad their stats. It’s like forward throwing the basketball off the backboard over and over again to get more rebounds. The player doesn’t care about the game, nor do his rebounds help the team.
Twitter can be a very valuable tool when used as originally designed. You follow people whom you feel can provide you value, and you yourself provide value back to the community. People will follow you if they feel they can gain something from you. What is the point of having 15,000 followers if none of them care what you have to say? What is the point of following 15,000 people if you can’t get any value out of your stream because it is so cluttered with trash? And, by the way, all those people who are following you are in the same boat. Twitter becomes a popularity contest and looses its value.
The solution? Go through your following list today. Look at each person you are following and ask, “do I have any idea who this is, what they usually talk about, or what value they add?” Once you have your ridiculous following count down to a manageable number, you will find that you actually check Twitter for valuable information from people you trust to deliver it to you instead of glancing at 300 random tweets from whatever small subset of people happen to have said something within the last millisecond. And by the time you figure out that you have no idea what you are looking at, a new set of 300 useless tweets will have hit the front door.
Some will still argue that this is just the way Twitter is, and that there are plenty of 3rd party ways to whittle down the junk to find what is important, but the problem is many people new to Twitter are more mainstream and wont be able to figure that stuff out. So they are stuck with Twitter as it is now: a group of people stroking their egos. Let’s make Twitter better.
Filed under: Communication, Communication, Organization, Twitter
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