My take on the impact traditional marketing, e-marketing and social media marketing have on the small business.

Monday, April 27, 2009

To Follow or Not To Follow - Was There a Question?

(Recently read Ari Herzog's blog - ariwriter.com - and found I loved his latest "Why My Twitter Train is Stopping". Take a few moments and read it - it's good and inspired this posting!)

I, like many it seems, have been thinking about the mass follows that have been happening more and more these days, and the best way to deal with it. I don't have thousands of followers, and I don't follow thousands of people. My numbers have crept up recently, but are still well under 300.

My theory on the follow (which I hope you can appreciate!):
1. Just because you follow me doesn't mean I will follow you back. Reasons I won't follow you back can include:
  • You have 6 updates, are following/being followed by thousands.
  • Every single update in your stream includes a link to your website.
  • Everything you say is nonsensical - there is no point to your post!
2. Just because I follow you doesn't mean you have to follow me back. I could be interested in what you have to say, but my ramblings are of no interest to you. That's ok. I don't expect it. (but it makes me happy if you do!)

3. When and if I decide to follow you it is based on your description, website and comment stream. I could care less how many followers you have. If you don't have a description and your stream includes any of the reasons listed above I will not follow you.

4. Just because I follow you doesn't mean I want a(n auto) DM saying 'Thank you for following! Click here for my latest super fabulous whitepaper on some topic you could care less about and will make you money on twitter'. Chances are that if I get such a DM I may just unfollow you. If you want to send a DM thanking me then personalize it already!

And finally...

5. Getting thousands of followers in one day, week or month is stupid. Sorry, had to be said. Some of us don't have cool tools like tweet deck or twirl or whatever else is out there to help organize tweets and filter noise. I only have so much time to spend on twitter (ok - I spend more time than I should but that's another story) - and I really don't want to waste it reading another ad on how to grow my list of followers. Enough already!

Bravo to Ari for unfollowing all and starting from scratch. It makes a lot of sense to me as it should to a lot of others.

How do you handle followers?

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