Habitually Good

Following up on my commitment to myself on writing about Twitter, here’s another post that covers a key basic aspect of Twitter – the concept of following someone and gaining followers. Here’s my idea of how this works and what are the things to watch out for.

First the Basics – what is the concept of following?

Twitter allows you to send out broadcasts about “What are you doing?”. These broadcasts are published on a Public TimeLine and anyone can see them. However, with millions of people tweeting, it would be an impossible task to read all such tweets. Here is where the concept of Followers comes in. You can create a subset of tweets that you want to monitor as compared to the entire world. In other words, you can create a subset of people whose tweets you want to read. You do this by following these individuals.

To follow someone, you need to go to their profile (you also need to be logged in to Twitter) and click on the Follow button below their name. Take a look at the image below, it shows this button (you can click the image to go to the actual profile on Twitter):

Similarly, if you want to stop following someone, you can again visit the profile page and click on the same button (it would now say, Following) and choosing the Remove option.

Well, that is how you follow someone (you can click on the image above to go to Twitter and start following me).

The reason for why you are following someone is the same reason for why people will follow you – they are interested in what you have to say (there are exceptions, and I list them towards the end of the article under the title – Follow Spam).

What is the benefit of all this ‘following’ business?

Well, it is actually a very useful thing. There are all types of Twitter users out there. You can look at the public timeline (all tweets) and if you notice a tweet which you like, you can check that user’s profile to see if he/she always tweets interesting things. In which case, you may want to start following them so that you see their tweets in your own timeline.

If you are a blogger, you may want a lot of people following you, so that whenever you write a new blog post, you have a captive audience to whom you can announce the availability of this new content. In this respect, its kind of like an RSS feed.

If you like to be kept notified of certain events (such as conferences, parties, etc.) there are Twitter users out there who are more like notification services you might want to follow.

There are many reasons why you would want to follow someone, or why you might want to have people following you. It of course makes a huge sense if you are a business, but as an individual as well it is a lot of fun if you have a group of intelligent followers who will actually come back and talk to you about your updates and create conversations on Twitter.

The dark side of this ‘following’ business!

Well, all is never well in the state of Twitter. Just because someone starts to follow your updates doesn’t mean that they are interested in what you have to say. To follow someone is also the biggest trick that people use to gain followers themselves. A lot of new Twitter users don’t understand one thing:

It is not necessary to reciprocate the Follow action on Twitter.

Which means that just because someone is following you, you don’t necessarily have to follow them. You should choose whom you follow independent of whether they are following you or not. Sure there will be mutual pairs which follow each other, but that shouldn’t be a rule.

There are three types of people who follow you on Twitter:

• Bots – People have written automated scripts which scan the Twitter streams for certain keywords and automatically start following any user who uses them. Again their function is to get you to follow them as well (as part of a reciprocal action).
• Spammers – A lot of people just sit and Follow people all day. They start following thousands of Twitter users. Now if someone is following Thousands of users, (with you being one of them), do you think they will ever have the time to look at what you are saying amongst the thousands that they are following? The only thing they are trying to do is gain followers themselves.
• Genuine Followers – these are real people who are really interested in what you have to say. They probably enjoy the same topics as you do. They may actually be candidates that you want to follow back as well. These are the real users of Twitter.

There are of course exceptions to the above. There are people who are actually reading what you say and may approach you in an acceptable fashion instead of spamming you. Here’s an example that I wrote about a few days ago – Using Twitter correctly for your business.

So, who should you follow?

Me, of course. On a more serious note, you should follow friends, people whose topics you are interested in, blog authors that you follow, etc. If someone starts following you, pay a visit to their profile. If they are following more than a couple of hundred people, they are probably a spammer. If all their posts simply point to one or two of the same website, they are probably a spammer. If their conversation looks like a marketing campaign or a sales pitch, they are probably a spammer.

Also, I don’t think it makes sense to follow too many people. You will never hear them all.

Do leave comments to offer your insights into this aspect of Twitter.

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