 |
| image via http://www.charlesstone.com |
I'm not talking about the 'too much attention to cope with' folk, the @stephenfrys or @bbcbreakingnews of this world (for example), I'm talking more the moderately interesting or those who may have done a lot of conference speaking, or (heaven forfend, and trust me, I'm aware of the risk in every word of this, those who have puiblished a book). It's not that they aren't simply following me back (quelle domage), it's that they appear to be following almost nobody.
I mean if you are following sub 500 and your follower level is closer to 50,000, well something seems to have gone wrong there.
For a start, that doesn't happen organically. You take the decision to cull.
Some may do it for ego and aesthetic reasons - look at the ratio on that!
Most would wrap this in the reason of 'signal versus noise'.
Which is just so much bs unless you happen to be using twitter 24/7 and have text alerts pinging on your phone each time you get an @message. I need back up in case I miss the thing that's important to me being tweeted or retweeted. 3000 folk gives me that cover. Always has so far.
It also gives me diversity. If I don't open up to outliers, how will I see the extreme moments that often have the most impact on our world (the Black Swans for those of an Anti-fragile bent).
I've always tried to follow back pretty much everyone who follows me. But even in this I have started to hit a limit. Mine is around 3000. If I start following more than that I go seeking to clear out some deadwood - the folk who are not, or hardly ever, contributing to my time line.
And this is where I find it odd that folk with big follower numbers to feed (for surely their's is a broadcaster-audience relationship) feel that they can learn enough about their world from following less than 500 folk to provide a credible curation.
I salute their ability to select. I salute their trust in those they choose. I salute the trust their audiences confer on them.
But I can't help thinking they are helping to accelerate Twitter towards being the place where broadcast and self-promotion dominates rather than a place where adhoc communities of purpose form to get things done (which remains its promise).
Culling those you follow is - in extremis - like limiting your view to that from a prison cell. Why volunteer for that?
I would be delighted to hear from people who have taken this radical approach (culling those they follow) to reduce their exposure to noise or for whatever reason they have, and how it'
s working for them.
But until I hear a very good case I'm going to stick with the theory that one extra node on your network doubles its value: and that this 2n proposition can only happen if the connection between nodes is two-way.
I have perhaps the kind of skewed ratio you mean here - 1977 followers, 139 following.
ReplyDeleteI do take your point about the dangers of the skew - it's just that I don't know how to do otherwise.
My mistake - and it probably is a mistake - is that I read every single tweet that goes past, and perhaps 30% or the articles pointed to in the links on those tweets. Hence in practice I can only track a fairly small range of Tweeters with a total of around 200-250 tweets a day. Even that costs something like 2 hours a day, maybe more - a heck of a chunk out of my working day.
I use Twitter primarily as a form of business-intelligence. I select pretty carefully across a wide range of disciplines - not solely in a single field. There are some very good people I simply don't have the time to follow - particularly those who are very prolific. If I really need to know what they're doing, my other follows are likely to retweet them, so I do catch the most important themes anyway.
In my defence I don't do much 'self-broadcast': most just one-off announcements of new blog-posts, and occasional comments on my work or context (such as a minor earthquake here in Guatemala last week). Most of what I tweet - around 10-20 tweets per day - are retweets of items that I think would be relevant for my follower-community, most of them in enterprise-architecture and the like. In other words, mostly an aggregator.
As I say above, I'm probably doing this 'wrong', but it sort-of works, and people do seem to find useful. Any suggestions as to how I could/should do it better?
At the risk of self-broadcasting, this is what I do.
ReplyDeleteI use lists to keep a track of the people whose tweets I absolutely don't want to miss (e.g. a list for media people, a list for personal friends) and then use the main twitter page as a stream of consciousness that I can find random links and inspiration from.
The only reason I have for unfollowing people is if they post too often in a short space of time, and the only reason I have for taking someone off a list is if they cease to be interesting.
One more example. I unfollowed Tomi Ahonen, but added him to his own list, so if ever I want a bit of Tomi - about twice a week - I can get it.
Good call on Tomi ;-)
Delete