I Will Follow You Back On Twitter
I want to follow you on Twitter. Simply follow me at http://www.twitter.com/jasonmoffatt and I’ll follow you back.
For the last couple of years I’ve refused to follow every single person that followed me on Twitter. My reason for it was because I felt it was disingenious and didn’t really display what I was truly interested in.
Many people like to say… “I have 27,000 followers on Twitter” and I say… “No you don’t”.
Just because you scrape the internet or use some Twitter mass following tool to attain more followers doesn’t mean that these people are paying any attention to you at all. It’s a very artificial number and doesn’t accurately reflect how many people really give a rats ass about what you have to say.
On the contrary, I built up a following of 7000 people without playing the reciprocal follow game and it all happened without me doing anything. These people found me on their own, or via their own automated bots. Because I’m in the marketing world, at least 4000 of those people are marketers who could probably care less about what I’m saying, but they are just trying to inflate their numbers to provide a bogus bit of social proof.
Everyone has a different way to use Twitter, and to each their own. I’ve always been fine with being a Twitter Snob and only following the people that I want. However, after hearing Tim Sanders talk about social media and Twitter the other day I decided to ease up on having a elitist attitude towards Twitter and agreed to follow back anyone that follows me.
My reasons for doing so are this…
1. I like to keep my finger on the pulse of new trends and chatter across the web. Following more people allows me to get a better idea of the markets I’m trying to serve and people I may want to connect with personally.
2. Most marketing folks have automated scripts that will unfollow me if I don’t follow them back within a few days. Now I don’t put too much worry into losing followers here and there, but I’m on a bigger mission than just to hock a few products and I’d like my messages to be seen by as many people as possible.
3. With the addition of “Twitter Lists” I can sort and aggregate the people that I truly want to stay in touch with. So the argument that following too many people dilutes the Twitter stream and I can’t see what’s going on falls a bit flat.
4. I want to reward people that follow me and pay attention to my tweets with the courtesy that I’ll attempt to pay attention to theirs. I can’t promise this for everyone, but I’m pretty good at plowing through a ton of info in record time.
Here’s the bad part of following everyone back…
1. I will now get spammed like crazy in my direct messages box. It will essentially render it useless and legitimate messages will get buried and unanswered.
2. Auto direct messages will flood in like crazy. Note to self: Turn off the email updater about direct messages. Please don’t be offended if I don’t answer direct messages. It will just be too much. I’m much better at conversing on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/jasonmoffatt
I really hope I don’t regret this decision.
Anyhow, hit me up on Twitter if you haven’t already. My Twitter ID is at http://www.twitter.com/jasonmoffatt
Cheers,
Jason
PS: If you are already following me it may take me a week or so to follow you back. I’m trying to catch up on all the old followers but can’t add them all at once or I’ll risk getting my account suspended for adding too many people at once. If you want to speed up the process, send me a @ reply to @jasonmoffatt by clicking here and I’ll follow you back right away.
