I check out every new Twitter follower and make a personal decision whether or not to follow that person back. Sometimes I do and sometimes not, but auto-follow is not part of my strategy. However, many people do, as is evidenced by some of the numbers.
When I Iook at someone's Twitter profile and see a couple hundred tweets accompanied by large follower and following numbers, unless they're a celebrity, it's pretty obvious that they went to someone else's list and followed everybody on it. Many of those people then reciprocally followed back. That's all fine and good if all you care about is numbers, but they don't necessarily tell the whole story.
Most people reach a tipping point where they can no longer read all the tweets of everyone they follow by the time they're following about 100 people. To resolve this, they build lists of favorites on Twitter or start using an application like Hootsuite of TweetDeck, where they build groups.
But people who have little history and who may not necessarily have gotten into a groove of delivering content that many people find interesting are probably not going to end up on one of those lists that people actually read regularly, so despite big follower numbers, very few people are actually paying attention to what they're saying.
A similar argument can be made for Facebook and LinkedIn. There are plenty of collectors out there who make it their mission to have as many friends and connections as possible to build their egos. But is there any quality to these "relationships?" Are these relationships at all?
Everyone has their own idea of how social media works best for them. Some use it personally, some professionally, and for many people, it crosses the lines of both.
For me, it comes down to community. I am interested in a building community of quality people that I can bounce ideas off of, share resources with, learn from, collaborate and laugh with. This community becomes my cheerleader when I do something good, and it pumps me up when I'm nervous or blue. My social media community is a very powerful resource.
So, I have chosen to select people who help build a community that is useful to me. I regularly move people in and out of my favorite lists, and I pay close attention to a handful of people who provide the greatest value to me. I'm pretty sure that none of those people have just 100 tweets and 4000 followers.
Image Credit: Microsoft
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