Obscure title I know-but here’s a long dormant thought for you to contemplate.
Last year it occurred to me that there was an inverse relationship between the volume of Twitter ‘followers’ I had accumulated and the quality of the relationships.
This started to become apparent when my ‘following’ reached over the 100 mark, and has been reinforced as the numbers passed 2000.
It seemed popular particularly, thought not exclusively among online marketers to chase the numbers. There would be self-congratulatory tweets exclaiming joy at hitting 1000, 2000 or even 10000 ‘followers’ as if it actually meant anything. E-books were compiled to educate the ignorant on how to amass tens of thousands of ‘followers’. To what purpose, a few may ask?
You’ve no doubt noted the inverted commas. I use the term ‘followers’ very loosely. This is undoubtedly a misnomer. If you are tweeting regularly on topics of inane pointlessness for periodic relief of boredom-then that’s certainly your prerogative, however I would suggest that the belief that you have 5000 followers taking even the remote interest is, well, delusional.
I doubt the irreverent tone of this Blog is upsetting anyone, unless the afore mentioned delusion was deeply ingrained, but the point of this scribble is to posit an alternate use of this hugely useful interactive tool.
I have a secondary Twitter account that I am just about to launch. It has been sitting sedentary for ages since the first seed of the following proposition popped in to my head. My experiment that I’d love you to join me in is as follows. Create a second account if you are already in Twittersphere and promote it only to those that you can build a genuine connection with. Those for instance whose content you are actually interested in and whom presumably will offer reciprocal dialogue.
My objective is to create a ‘following’ ‘followers’ target of max 100! –Excuse the garbled language! If you could only follow 100, who would you follow? Personally I would only follow those with some mutual connectivity benefits. Those for instance that post interesting, informative, humorous content rich tweets and links, rather than the random anonymous pitching of business links, without any effort to relationship and community build.
Hope this doesn’t sound like I’m pontificating. I will continue to maintain my other Twitter account but the link below is only for those with whom I can genuinely engage.
So that’s it. The radical concept. Follow a Max 100 and only follow those who have 100 or less followers!
Would love to hear your thoughts. My firm belief is that the quality of tweeting will improve ten or even 100 fold.
Hook up on www.twitter.com/kiaranfinn and if you’ve got less than 100 followers I’ll follow you back and hopefully engage!
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