Baby Got Follow-Back
March 13, 2008
Yeah, another unscheduled, unstructured post.
This one is because I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile and the lovely Susan Reynolds [@susanreynolds] spurred me on to doing it. She has a knack of doing that!
Okay, so it’s another Twitter-centric post here. (surprise!)
Basically, since I go to Twitter for the conversation, the stimulus, and the ideas it generates within me, my policy has been to follow back almost everyone that follows me… and to follow new and interesting folk whenever I find them. But there are exceptions. There are accounts I look at and don’t immediately ban, but don’t follow back. Here’s the list of reasons why:
Reasons I’m not following you on Twitter:
1. You have only 2 or 3 posts, are following hundreds of people and have only a handful following you. – You aren’t contributing to the conversation, you are listening to it. Come back when you have something to say. Otherwise you’re being kind of creepy.
2. You are followed by hundreds or thousands, but only follow a couple dozen people yourself.* - You aren’t there for the conversation, you’re there for the audience. If I wanted to be your audience, I’d go to your blog.
*exception: there are a couple (by couple I mean can count on one hand) of folks I follow right now who do this that aren’t following me as well, mostly, it’s because it’s someone who has information I want, if that stops, I will remove them.
3.You don’t really exist. Just a pseudonym, no bio info, no blog link, no photo.** – Sorry, if I’m going to put myself out there publicly and say ‘I stand behind this – so when you Google me 10 years from now, I won’t be ashamed you found this’ I expect the same level of trust from someone I’m interacting with.
**exception: I do realize there are reasons for having an online persona… if you have a blog, and a history, and are a real person using a pseudonym to avoid losing your job, being stalked, or something legitimate, that’s another story. But just a Twitter account and an ID is not enough.
4. You tend to swear like a sailor, only post dirty jokes, links to adult sites, or use Twitter like a singles pick-up bar. – That is *so* your right! Twitter is different things to different people – that’s just not my cup of tea. I’m surprised you followed me in the first place. I’m kind of boring in that regard.
5. You mangle the English language. – Now, I don’t mean the occasional omission of a word or obvious abbreviation to make that tweet fit into the arbitrary 140 character limit. I mean every post of yours uses things like LOLspeak (No, you canz not haz my attention) or text-speak (ur gr8 bt /thx! btdt) or l33tsp34k (omgwtfbbq! that suxxorz!) and you think I’m going to take the time to translate? Nope.
6. You don’t actually write your feed. – Sorry, if your timestream consists solely of links to your blog, your seesmics, your qiks, your utterz, or other external sites, no thanks. That’s not conversation, that’s link spam.
7. You’re a bot or a ‘project’. – Thanks, but I don’t care which political candidate you are working for… and no, I’m not going to prove to your friend that if you write a script to auto-follow thousands of people on twitter, several hundred will follow you back.
8. You only follow the opposite gender. – Sorry, I’m happily married. Not interested in providing you with another photo for your harem. I won’t just not follow you – I’ll block you on that one. Ew.
9. You’re trying to sell me something. – Okay, realistically, a lot of the Social Media folk are always selling something… whether it’s trust, or pushing a conversation toward a goal, or delivering traffic to new startups… that’s to be expected. But if you’ve got a retail website and the only reason you followed me and 2,000 other people is to send links about your latest sale/deal/bargain? No dice.
10. You never use the @ symbol. – Sure, it takes a bit for people to get how the @ functions in Twitter… but if you’ve been on there for awhile, and you have more than a couple dozen people on your lists, then you know that @ is the heart of the conversation on Twitter. No, you don’t have to use it every tweet. But if you don’t use it at all, then you’re basically just standing in the middle of the room shouting and hoping that someone realizes you are talking to them.
I’m sure there’s more. I’m also sure there are exceptions. I’ll probably edit this list as we go along – and if you happen to have any you think I should add, please speak up! Or if you post your own list, I’d love to see it – leave me a link in the comments.
There are about a dozen people following me that I have never followed back, and won’t, no matter how many times they ‘re-add’ me to get my attention. But in every case, the reason can be found above.
So – next I guess we go with figuring out the list of ‘why I add people before they add me.’ Yeah, I’ll get right on that. With my usual alacrity.
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