I thought it was about time I wrote a post about Twitter since I have been active in the Twitterverse for 4 months now and have not written any posts about it.
First, I want to mention that I have "met" some amazing, intelligent, motivated, successful, and supportive people on Twitter. The list is long to mention them all, but I will mention that some thought goes into who I follow on Twitter.
Some Twitters have "formulas" or "criteria" that goes into deciding who to follow. Others do not have any criteria and follow everyone who follows them. Then there are those people who follow a very, very select few - mostly celebrities like Oprah or those who think they are celebrities.
The bottom line for me is I follow people that add value, either personally, professionally, mentally, or spiritually .
Simple. I am looking for valuable connections. Interaction.
There are only a few categories of Twitters that I will flat out not follow even before I look at other criteria. These are spammers, porn, and those with no updates.
When I decide to follow someone, if they do not fail in the above categories, I will look at specific things in their Twitter world. These are generalities and it really comes down to a judgment call. But, here is the "profile" of people I will typically not follow.
- I won't follow people that do not take the time to add an avatar or a bio, but there are exceptions.
- Celebrities (unless they interact with their followers - so I do not follow @Oprah).
- People who only promote themselves, or their business.
- The "I just woke up and had eggs for breakfast" minute-to-minute play by play updates.
- If all the Tweets are narrowly focused on a very specific niche that I have zero interest in.
- I am not interested in following those whose ratio of followers to follows is completely skewed. This goes both ways - I am not interested in someone who follows 1 person for every 1,000+ that follows him or her OR someone who has 1 follower for every 1,000+ follows.
This may seem like I have strict criteria and a mighty tight formula. This is not true. To be honest, while some people do fall into those categories, many other people on Twitter do not.
Because I put in this initial step upfront, I very rarely unfollow people unless the Tweets become obnoxious in some way. I look at everyone's profile and will not use any auto follow tools to get more followers. It is not about the numbers. It is about the quality of people, the added value.
My bottom line philosophy is you never know where a good idea will come from, so take the time to follow the little guy, just use some common sense in the process.
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