I have seen other blog posts on a similar vein to this one but I don’t care. I’m going to talk about it because it intrigues me.
Whenever I get an email saying that somebody is following me I go and look at their profile.
I also use Social Too to give me, on a daily basis, a list of people who have begun to follow me or stopped following me (a very useful tool). Again, when i see that somebody has started following me I go and look at their profile.
The reason I look at profiles is to a) ask myself what it is that I have said that makes this person want to follow me and b) to consider whether they are worth following back.
I fail to understand sometimes why some people who decide to follow me want to. I had one the other week who was a beer drinking Newcastle united supporter who works as a labourer. I looked through her tweets and could not see any shared interests at all. Why on earth would she want to follow me unless she is working a numbers game, trying to build up her followers by following more. What is the point in that?
I also sometimes get nothing from the profile that makes me want to follow them. I had one the other day that said his name was ploton and he was from the planet zog, or some such similar inanity. This gives me nothing at all on which to base a judgement as to why I woudl want to follow them.
Another useful tool for determining people to follow, people that can add value, is Mr Tweet. Mr Tweet looks at the subjects you tend to Twitter on and then suggests others that you may like to follow. One of my first steps is to look at the number of tweets these people make a day. Too many and I don’t bother. I don’t want them clogging things up so that I miss something I really do want to see.
I had one the other day that against my better judgement, based on the number of tweets per day, I did decide to follow him. he was obviously reading the telegraph on line yesterday because he tweeted about every single story he read. If I want to read the telegraph I will read the telegraph I don’t need somebody to give me a link to each individual story. Again, is this also a numbers game. Seeing if you can get in the record books for the greatest number of tweets per day.
I saw an interesting blog the other day where somebody (and forgive me that i can’t remember who) introduced me to the 90:10 rule where 90% of your tweets should add value and the remaining 10% can be for other stuff. A good rule I think.
So for me its not a numbers game. I don’t have hundreds of followers and I don’t follow hundreds of people. The people I do follow I can either learn from or they provide me with amusement. For those that follow me I hope I can add something to the discussion.
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