Twitter following policy
You may have discovered that I’ve suddenly stopped following you on Twitter, or you’ve followed me and wonder why I haven’t followed you back. Here I try to explain myself.
I’m currently following 199 people, and for me that’s quite a large commitment because I try to pay attention to all of you. If someone directs a message to me I like to reply, whether I’m following them or not. Therefore I don’t want to greatly increase my Twitter ‘friends’.
Following back
If you follow me, thank you: I hope you enjoy what you see. If I don’t follow you back it’s because I’m struggling with what I’ve got and don’t want to add to it. It also probably means that you don’t fit the profile of who I want to follow at the moment, but that is entirely arbitrary on my part and not at all a reflection of your tweets: and it may well change in your favour at some point.
Unfollowing
I’ve tried very hard not to stop following people, but at some point I feel it will be inevitable. If I do unfollow you it is very probably nothing that you have said. Ignore Qwitter, if you use it (Qwitter’s a service that alerts you when people stop following you and tells them which message pre-empted it). If I stop following you it’s simply down to my capacity to stay engaged with other people: please don’t let Qwitter make you think I took umbrage at something you said!
Blocking
If I block you it’s because you’ve followed me purely to promote your product or service with no intention of informing or engaging, and you are very probably a spammer. Take the hint and go away.
But for the majority of you who are genuine, please be reassured that if I unfollow or don’t follow you back it’s simply because I don’t feel I can do you justice at the moment.
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Like the idea of explaining your personal Twitter 'policy' here as there just isn't enough room in Twitter's 'bio'. Think I might do something similar on my blog and link from my bio (if that's possible). One thing I want to explain is that I consider myself an 'early adopter' and love to encourage new people to use technology, so I will often start to follow new users to give them some encouragement at the start, before I really know what they are going to tweet about, so it's quite likely that I will unfollow a good number of these once they've found their feet.
However, I will say that just as in real life, people should not expect to get along with everyone. It's just not realistic and not even really desirable, we simply wouldn't have time. We shouldn't expect ourselves to find everyone's tweets interesting or relevant and certainly shouldn't feel bad if we don't, it's just human nature. And of course as with many things, where friends are concerned, I think it's quality over quantity every time!
The beauty about Twitter and other social networking tools is that we can get to know each other better and more quickly than in real life and make friends based on common interests and attitudes rather than simply just geography.
Personally, I don't fancy using Qwitter, I'm not really bothered if people stop following me. As long as I'm tweeting what I want to about what interests me, then what does it matter if someone isn't interested, we're obviously just not destined to be friends (or twiends!).
Me again! Just remembered something else I wanted to say.
I'm not following quite as many as you, currently 140, but I too feel I'm nearing the limit of what I can cope with. However, my plan is that if I do find some really interesting new people, then I'll just reshuffle who I'm following and unfollow the least interesting to me. So it is my intention to continually 'hone' my list of followees so it becomes more and more interesing and useful to me personally
lol I was thinking the same following just 35 people – how anyone manages to keep up with hundreds I don't know! For me the value in twitter is pointers to stuff thats going on and things that other people find so I try to seek out people with similar interests (not many based on how few I do follow!) – I don't see that as 'vanity publishing' but I think you're right Olly that theres a lot of that going on. The politics thing is funny too and 'ooh how popular/interesting am I cos look at all my 'followers' (which I hate as a term). I do the same with facebook too – less noise = better conversation
Indeed; that's my intention too.
Blimey – didn't realise there was quite so much politics involved in Twitter. Personally I couldn't give a monkees if someone follows me or not – Twitter is essentially vanity publishing so I don't expect anyone to feel they should follow what I say.
I wish Twitter did the same thing as Flickr, and showed only the last four tweets from an individual (and then perhaps a count of how many they've sent in the last 24 hours that you could expand and see). There is probably something out there that does this, but to be honest Twitter is only a distraction product for me so I haven't really invested in trying to perfect it.
But you;re still following me, right?