Dave, here is a question for you. Today I got a Twitter follow from someone who has made a total of 1 tweet, and yet this person already has 3,712 followers. I’ve seen other Twitter accounts with the same high number of followers and hardly any tweets yet. How do they do that? I thought content was important to building followers on Twitter.
This is an interesting question because it highlights one of the problems with social media overall: the system can be manipulated so that it rewards people who exploit the technology rather than a meritocracy where reach is a legitimate measure of influence.
in fact, there’s no logical reason to someone to follow an inactive account, whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media network. You don’t attend a church where the pastor stands in the front of the room and remains quiet, so why would you follow someone who doesn’t participate?
And that’s the grand dilemma of social networking: it’s intended to allow participation, to let companies and individuals all engage and interact, but all too many are one way channels, broadcast media where responses or engagement is ignored completely.
That’s why it’s so remarkable when companies like Chevrolet, Chrysler and Comcast (to be alliterative) actually do pay attention on a service like Twitter and where they will respond to customer comments and queries about their products or services, because it is a rare occurrence.
Twitter is an interesting case for another reason too: it turns out that it’s not very scalable and what works really well when you have 38 people you’re following doesn’t work at all when you have 38,000 people you’re following. The result is that you really aren’t following anybody and more likely than not you’re using tools that let you ignore the vast majority of people you “follow”.
The people who are following you face the same dilemma regarding how many people they follow and how much attention they can pay to each one. So those people who have tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of followers? There really aren’t that many people paying attention to them, so that follower count ends up a poor and inaccurate measure of online influence.
Long answer short, before you make the decision to follow someone on Twitter, it’s always a good idea to have a glance at their stats. If it’s wonky, as you noticed, then just say no.
Now that you mention this, I’ve had a couple of inactive Twitter accounts following me this week – no tweets but with 1000’s of followers. What is that all about? I didn’t follow back!
I’m with your views on this one Dave, I’m following you but don’t expect the same back. I follow through interest only and never return reciprocal follows just for the fun of it.
The inactive accounts were rather beautiful women (well, the profile pics were), so I presume they are from adult oriented sites looking for a join somewhere along the way??
Great site, Love your work man!!
Dan D’Laine
IMO the majority of those who follow the 0-tweeters are either doing so without knowing it — hijacked in some unsavory way — or more likely, doing so in order to communicate through direct messages because they are all part of some shady network marketing scheme. I also believe that many of the 0-tweeters may be the same person with multiple accounts. The ones I am most suspicious of at the moment are those who use a female name with five random letters added. I have 6 of them following me.
The main problem with Twitter, IMO, is that the advice for so long has been to follow thousands of people because a lot of people will just automatically follow someone who follows them. Some twitter clients actually had this auto-follow function built in last time I checked.
Some people auto-follow because they’ve been told that it’s polite, some have been told it’s the way to get more followers, etc.
Usually these people have approximately as many follows as followers, generally somewhere in the thousands. Their follower count is a status badge, a way of proving what a social media expert they are to the uninitiated.
Honestly, almost everyone I would follow on Twitter is someone who has a fan page on Facebook or is my friend on Facebook. I have them in my news feed, and when they tweet something they think their fans/followers would enjoy they share it on Facebook too. Like Dave shared this article.
I quit Twitter in 2009 and haven’t missed it.