Get More from Twitter – Reduce Who You Follow and Who Follows You
There seems to be a craze in Twitter to have as many followers as you can. When I first joined and started to check some profiles out, I was amazed at how people with tens of thousands of followers could reach that number. Celebrities and famous CEOs sure, a lot of people have a celebrity fixation, but many of them did not seem to be famous, or a celebrity, or even have very intersting tweets. How did they do it? I thought it would be amazing to have this many followers so I started to read up on it.
What I believe to be one of the best methods to increase followers is to follow as many peole as you can. This is because a lot of those people will follow you back. Many people may be using tools to automatically follow people back hence increasing your followers.
So I thought I would start following as many people as I could (but just ones I thought would be of interest). True to the articles, I started to have many followers following me back in a short time period.
But I have quickly come to realise that many of these followers are not worth having. It turned out most of them were either “marketeers” or “spammers”. In fact they are mainly from marketeers who’s posts were mainly sales pitches, quotes or generally non interesting posts. Yet they would have tens of thousands of followers! I couldn’t understand why so many people followed them.
Then it dawned on me… I could see that they were following a similar number of followers, tens of thousands. It can’t be in anyones interest to follow tens of thousands of others, there’ll be too much useless information to take in. You can’t keep up with everyone. Any interesting and worth reading tweets will be missed (although Tweetdeck will help with this).
So I quickly realised that these marketeers were just doing what I read to do to gain followers. They were following as many people as they could so they could build up as many followers as they could! I realised this is what I was doing, and this is why I am getting so many useless followers every day!
Therefore I have decided Twitter is not about how many followers you have. Those numbers are meaningless, and those non-celebrity marketeers, with tens of thousands of followers have tens of thousands of marketeer followers, people only following them to increase their followers. What a pointless excercise.
So I have decided to un follow any marketter or spammer or anyone with nothing interesting to say. I am only going to follow those I find interesting. The peope I follow will dramatically drop, and this may have an impact on my followers, but I think its much better to follow those few with tweets you are interested in, and have few followers who are interested in you, rather than thousands of meaningless followers, and follow thousands of marketeers. Otherwise you are just subscribing to a huge spam list!
So let’s not make twitter about who has the most followers, or following thousands back, and end up being by inbox for spam, but fewer yet high quality tweets to make Twitter a true educational, social, fun, collaborative system we can benefit from.
Rant over 
Absolutely. Excellent points, Laurie.
Twitter is awash with gullible people who buy into these schemes. I suspect a large number of them have bought these software packages that promise to build them a twitter following while they sleep and pay them royalties if any of those followers are equally gullible and buy the package. We used to have a name for this kind of operation: Pyramid.
The blatant ones are just full of links to their product, the subtle ones (I suspect, the ones on the software) are mostly contextless quotes from “worthy” figures with only occasional links, to make it harder for Twitter to spot they are abusing the rules.
I fund Twitter at its best when you can have a friendly chat with a few people while taking a break. The real benefit is of starting conversations with the people they talk to, and building your network that way.