TWITTER FOLLOW FRENZY DEBATE!
Okay folks... the other night, I started Tweeting about the whole following issue. I think a few people took me wrong, so this is my chance to clarify what the heck I meant.
So here's the background. In this day and age, everyone is in a race to get the biggest following on Twitter. People follow others hoping they will reciprocate the "kind gesture" and follow back. The ones who don't reciprocate usually get dumped to free up the necessary space to follow another pile of future prospects.
The other night, I complained about people who don't talk to me after following me. I'm not talking about me following others, and not getting followed back. I have no problem with that. In fact, there are a handful of Tweeps that I enjoy following that do not follow me back. But I am benefiting from their contributions, so it isn't any blow to my ego. That aside, my situational "beef" is different.
What hacks me off is that I will be minding my own business, enjoying my tweeps, chatting and interacting, and somebody will follow me out of the blue. I'll notice that some of them have a lot of common interests, so I will follow back and introduce myself, and tell them "nice to meet you" and "looking forward to talking with you" and all that jazz... but then they don't answer. Ever.
That hits a nerve! Maybe I'm the only one annoyed by this, but I just don't get it. These very people who are doing this are normally the ones selling a product or service and pick me out of the lineup because I look like a prospective client. Naturally, you'd think they'd be all over the fact that I broke the conversation. But they are so busy robot-following hundreds of people per day, they blow right by the very prospective clients and buyers that they are trying to capture in the first place.
Call me stupid, but I just think it is plain ridiculous. We're all in such a race to be the next Ashton Koocher with one million followers that we forget why we're here. Why don't we just cut to the chase, remove the limits, and auto follow (both ways) everyone in the entire Twitter population as soon as we sign up? I mean, in a few years, the "average" person will have a couple hundred thousand followers each, and the active users will probably have a few million each anyway. So why not just get straight to it? And when we do get to that point, how useful will Twitter be?
Bird food for thought.
1 comment:
You know, Twitter is a social media tool for people to get connected. But looking at the number of 'bots' created to increase the numbers of followers and the number of people actually using it; and promoting it, follow-ship has become more of a ego boosting trip than anything else.
So what if I have tens or even hundreds of thousand of followers when no one actually reads or responds to my tweets?
And by the way, I normally don't respond to DM because again, most of them are done by auto follow-back bots! I'll only respond to DM that addresses me by my name. That I'll know it's written by a real human. Of course and unless someone invents a bot for that too! LOL
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