Ben Roy

My position on Twitter has been to be careful about trying to connect with people in a meaningful way. I don't follow many of the people that follow me because they don't look interesting, appear to only be interested in selling stuff, or just all around don't give me a reason to follow them.

But now I'm starting to think the wrong approach. There are a few reasons why. First is simple: more people means more exposure, more chances to hit people with a message. Sure the overall quality of follower will be lower if I have 1000 people rather than 100 people. But if those additional 900 people act on even a small percentage of what I send across, it's still more than I would have had otherwise.

Secondly, part of the reason I avoid a lot of people is that I'm not interested in the stuff the say, or they seem spammy with regards to the amount of updates. Frankly though, some of the people I really did want to follow end up being that same way. I'm really not interested in seeing 42 quotes from famous people all in a row. Likewise I sometimes feel like a few of the people I follow, and want to be following, push their products a little too hard.

Lastly, and this one drives me nuts, it seems like everyone on Twitter measures you by the number of followers that you have. Nevermind that any random person can get a couple thousand followers in a short period of time by spam-following others. Enough other people that are only interested in having thousands of low value followers will follow them back and all of a sudden they have big time Twitter rep. Seems wrong to me, but nonetheless it's how it appears to be.

All of these things are pushing me to change positions, start following all but the lamest of users back, and generally grow my follower base. I can still leverage tools to try to focus on the people I'm really interested in.