Follow You Follow Me or not as a Twitter Strategy

Posted on 20 May 2009

Twitter is like new age spirituality was in the 1990s – cherry picking the bits that were nice, fun and easy to do. And, disdain for the activities that required effort, change and reflection. This is what is happening on Twitter.

Seth Godin says that if you have 1,000 followers, you have the beginning of a tribe. So, there’s a rush to get the first 1,000 followers. The predominant strategy is to follow others in the hope they follow you thereby building the so-called tribe.

But, do people follow back because they are genuinely interested in what you are tweeting about or, are they following you out of a sense of duty and reciprocation?

And, then what happens when you don’t follow them back because their tweets aren’t something you want clogging up your stream? And, there’s a tendency to dump you because you don’t follow back.

Then, there’s those people who adopt direct marketing strategies where there has to be lots and lots of people in order to have a good sales on just a 1% conversion. Those of you who’ve marketed offline will know the response from a direct marketing list is just 1-2%

So, if you want to reach your revenue targets, then this list would have to be in the tens of thousands and that means 10,000+ followers on Twitter.

I am not suggesting everyone is doing this but there are quite a few people adopting this rushing to build followers. This may be partly due to twitter showing the number of followers as if it is all important.

If you’re still reading, then what I’m saying must have some resonance.

How can Twitter be a community? A place where people feel comfortable with finding people through other people – after all that’s what networking is all about.

Guess it comes from being comfortable with who you are, what you offer and understand that relationships so take time to develop, despite the fast pace of life today.

Take your time on Twitter. It doesn’t matter if you’ve 2, 20, 200 or 20,000 followers. The only difference is the number of people who have found you, want to learn from what you say and even start a conversation in response to your tweets.

Consider the number of times your messages are forwarded. This is a measure of your standing in your community and your reach will not just your followers but those of everyone who retweets you.

This post was inspired by @sethsimonds unfollowing 45,000 and giving his reasons.