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Internet Thoughts

What is the point of ‘follow for follow’ on Twitter?

Before I allow myself to be impressed with the number of followers an individual has on twitter, I always stop to check how many people they follow themselves.

If you try this yourself you’ll see a surprisingly large number follow at least as many, if not more, as follow them. I call this the follow ratio, and its very important. Huge numbers of people are playing the meta game – they want a big number next to their name to give the illusion of popularity. And it is an illusion, because a person with a low follow ratio is probably as worthless as a tweeter with 10 followers but who follow nobody themselves.

I recently happened across someone with 2800 followers. Impressive? Not when I saw they were following more than 3000 back.

Consider the impracticality of subscribing to 3000 people. That’s enough to make Twitter useless. It’s too many people churning out too much data for anyone to comprehend. You can certainly filter these people into different lists, but again, even the lists for such numbers would be unmanageable. The point is that these people don’t want to read tweets, they want people who, when followed, feel compelled to follow back. YouTube would call this practice ‘sub for sub’.

It’s worthless. They don’t want to follow you. They are not engaged, motivated fans, hanging on your every word. They are people like you, gunning for the biggest, most pointless number out there. But what is the point when you tweet about your latest blog to your 2800 followers and get 10 hits back? That’s one of the lowest exposure vs. clickthrough rates in history.

You have no idea what your fans want, because you don’t have any real fans. Just a hoard of meta miners looking to build this worthless masquerade of popularity.

Don’t look at followers, look at the follow ratio. If they follow even half as many as follow them back, chances are they aren’t worth your time.

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