I’m experiencing Twitter growing pains–and I seek your advice.
After creating my Twitter account on June 9, 2008–three days after Kim Woodbridge wrote about environmental resources and engaged me in the comment section of her blog on why she uses Twitter–I’ve microblogged over 22,000 times. That’s a lot of sets of 140 characters!
Along the way, I’ve gained relationships, created speaking gigs, saved money, helped companies, been interviewed, shared value, and perhaps most important, received praise from you.
But something is amiss; and I request ten minutes out of your day to explain my long-winded predicament and solicit your help.
One week ago today, I reinstalled my operating system; and the result of that process involved similarly reinstalling executable files, e.g. TweetDeck.
In recent months, my usage was comparable to how Ken Burbary uses the toolbar application; namely, I assigned subsets of people and organizations to groups. This worked well, and I was able to easily follow the stream of, and converse with, over 500 tweeps. Scroll below and you can see I was following approximately 10% of my followers.
After the reinstall, when TweetDeck was once again out of the box, I realized very quickly it would be very time-consuming to hand-pick individual accounts and place them into groups–and I opted to change my Twitter strategy and reinvent my prior following rules and follow the world!
Fast forward seven days, and I not only changed my mind about SocialToo (sorry for my stinging words, Jesse!) but am using it to both auto-follow everyone and follow my followers. I’m not using groups anymore, but configured the screen real estate to focus on search columns, like this (click to zoom):
Here’s a visual shift in my following/follower numbers between March 30 and today:
MARCH 30, 2009
APRIL 23, 2009
Everything was going hunky-dory until about 48 hours ago when Twitter’s restrictive limits prevented me from following more people. Louis Gray explained the latest news about why the policy was stupid and inconsistent.
I am not following or direct messaging 1,000 times a day, nor do the other bullets affect me. But I can’t (manually) follow a soul, despite unfollowing dozens. While I await a response from Twitter’s support team, I’m thinking Robert Scoble may be right and Twitter prefers its users to be like recent bandwagoners Oprah and Ashton Kutcher who follow less than 10% of followers.
Which leads to my dilemma: To follow or not to follow?
If you click that link, you can read an article from Neal Wiser written earlier this year about his Twitter following policy, part of a larger disclaimer:
If the choice is between following everyone or following 10%, right now, right here, I’d prefer the former–a complete 180 of everything I’ve believed in the past–and follow everyone to grow my network and gain potential value from more people to therefore pass that value on to you. But, if Twitter’s new rules prevent me from following so many people a day or blah blah blah rules, I’m now considering a third 180-turn by seriously contemplating paying SocialToo $25 to delete all my friends–everyone I’m following–and start fresh and build those I follow, those I gain value from, those who may be you, from scratch.
As an online media strategist, if I believe anything I tell other people, it’s that there are no rules in social media. Which begs the question: Do I maintain the status quo, albeit seven days old, or do I “follow” my computer reinstall, my TweetDeck reinstall, and my new Twitter following dogma–and wipe those I follow–those 6,800 or so people–clean?
I’m very tempted to pay that $25, but a little birdie in my head suggests I not be rash and not act emotionally. Such is my predicament. If you made it down this far, thank you for reading. If nothing else, maybe I planted some ideas in your head, too. It goes without saying that you can follow me on Twitter @ariherzog.
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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Ari, I just spent some time this morning unfollowing about 150 people. I don’t buy into the “follow everyone back” mindset. Your attention is valuable. Just like caller ID lets you make decisions about who you answer calls from and your inbox tells you who is emailing, you have the right to reserve your attention for people who add value. When you follow everyone who follows you, you have no way of telling if they add value or not. The end result is that those who don’t decrease the overall value of the experience. If you eliminate them, your net experiential value goes up. I like how Neal has a set of goals. Unfortunately, I think that (almost) automatically re-following will impede his attainment of those goals rather than help. I wouldn’t be drastic and unfollow everyone, but I’ve found it valuable to occasionally reassess the return on my attention provided by some of the people in my stream.
Agreed. Pick the high value people, watch @replys to you and allow yourself to converse instead of only seeing a small % of your tweets.
Two weeks ago, I would have said the same thing. Now, I’m unsure, considering I’ve been tracking the word, “government,” for instance, and seen very prolific tweets by folks who joined Twitter last week and only tweeted 10 times. So, what does one tweet out of ten say about “high value twitterers?”
I used to be employed by a newspaper as a street reporter, and I constantly talked to people asking for quotes. Some talked, some didn’t, but if I didn’t ask for a quote, I usually didn’t get one. Switch to Twitter and imagine that following people is like constantly sticking a microphone in someone’s face; doesn’t matter what they say, for if one sentence sticks out, that could be the leading sentence. It usually is.
I can’t speak for SocialToo (or most other Twitter account management tools), as I haven’t used (or tried) many.
But, from what I gather from this post, it’s either a bulk follow or un-follow option that it gives you. If Twitter’s limiting this to 1,000 per day, then obviously this puts a spanner in the works.
So, why don’t you try Tweepular? It allows mass follow and un-follows, but with one big difference – you choose exactly how many to do this with. From 10 to 100, 500, 327, 19 or any other number you come up with.
Do this a cpla times and you’re sorted.
http://tweepular.com
PS – As always, disclosure time – Tweepular is a client. Despite that, this isn’t a pitch as such – I’m offering you a tip and suggestion as your friend, Ari.
Danny Brown´s last blog post..Why Social Media Needs the FTC
Ahh, but I’m not at that 1,000 number, but I hear your point. Thanks.
Ari – you brought yourself to my attention the other day when you were doing some experiment or other about #autoDM. From that and this current posting, I’d suggest you’re overthinking Twitter somewhat.
If you’re at the limit of the number of people you can follow – maybe rethink things somewhat – how much value do you gain from following 7,000 people? Is the reciprocal following more about gathering vast swathes of cattle to fire your message at? Would it be better to develop better relationships with less people?
I did all those bandwagon things that most Web 2.0ers do when discovering a new service – trying to build up the numbers through a number of methods. Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered now – I offer a Twitter feed to my blog readers, and I follow people who I’ve communicated with directly or who have relevance to my work. Playing the numbers game feels slightly parasitic in my book.
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Everyone who I previously tracked in a TweetDeck group is someone I have a relationship with–beyond Twitter. So, do I still need them in a group? Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t grouped anyone in a week and my productivity has increased based on different perspectives flowing down the stream. What does that say? Maybe I’ve outgrown TweetDeck. Hmm.
Ari,
I see that you are doing all these experiments to learn something and gain experience – experience that honestly, most people will never grapple with – but perhaps you are over-analyzing this decision. When you were following just the people you wanted to follow – didn’t that make the most sense and provide the most value? Back then (like a month or so ago) you said it did.
When you were following everyone (up to the rather high limit) weren’t you just getting a lot of noise? I see that you have systems and searches set up in TweetDeck, etc. but honestly following 6K people? What are you getting from that except way too much information. You can’t process the Tweets from that many people in any reasonable amount of time so by following that many people aren’t you eliminating the value of the individual in favor of the mob? And by following that many people you are either forced to pretty much ignore everything people have to say unless it has your @ in front of it and that seems to undermine part of the real value of Twitter.
Or if you are going to follow 6k people and actually listen to what’s going on, then Twitter will become your job, so I certainly hope you have a trust fund : – ) And why not just follow the public time line if you aren’t going to discriminate or curate your follow choices? If you just want to follow trends then that seems like as good a choice as any.
I know from my personal experience that not everyone who follows me is a person of interest. There are pyramid scams and Twitter equivalents of link farms and quasi-porn accounts and so on. And if I’m seeing that in my fairly small following, then the impact of that kind of garbage in a follow count of nearly 7k must be exponential. So, again, that leads me to ask, what’s the point of just following everyone who follows you? And hey – if it’s all just an experiment to have more stuff to talk about then try SocialToo because it’s just another fork in the road that is yet unexplored (by you).
And on a semi-related note, why are Oprah and Ashton Kutcher “bandwagoners”? What is the date before which you had to have joined Twitter to not be considered a hanger-on or wannabe? Is there a cut-off? Is there an actual date somewhere? And isn’t that how tools and platforms grow – by having people who are connected to other people join them?
I had a Facebook account in 2006, but never used it because my friends weren’t there. I started using it in earnest in 2008 because that is when enough of my friends showed up that it was an interesting platform. So am I a FB bandwagoner? Just checking ; – ) I bet Oprah’s fans were not part of the early-adopter crowd, but with a nudge from the mighty O perhaps they joined. By calling them bandwagoners it seems to imply that if you are not a cool kid – an early adopter – don’t bother. We don’t want you in our ecosphere. Should we tell all the people who haven’t yet reviewed anything on Yelp or contributed to a Wikipedia entry they missed the boat? If they do so now, aren’t they just bandwagoners? I mean Wikipedia has been around f-o-r-e-v-e-r in Web years. Where have these people been? Just reading Wikipedia? Puhleeze! That’s not what social media’s about.
And as for Twitter’s rules: it’s their service they can do what they want with it. Robert Scoble of all people should support arbitrary choices concerning customer satisfaction given his vehement support of the crappy UI changes recently given to FB users and rebelled against by the same. He said in several posts that FB should NOT listen to its users (stupid users don’t know what’s good for the company). So, perhaps the same logic can be applied to Twitter. It’s not about you, Ari, it’s about Twitter and you as a user are not privy to it’s grand vision for itself.
As for your following experiment. I would vote for quality over quantity. But I’m an old-fashioned kinda gal.
When I followed less, I saw the same amount of “noise,” but I couldn’t stray from it without removing them from “groups.” Now, I see the same amount of noise but focus on those replying or DMing me. Everyone else is part of the background, the public timeline if you will.
I admit I am an over-analyzer, a genetic trait passed down. Analyzing and strategy go hand-in-hand with design; which is what I’m trying to grapple with. Thanks.
Ari, thanks for your kind words, and no apology necessary. It’s up to you, but I’d give it 24 hours. There may be some sort of trigger you hit or something like that, but I’ve found those often fix themselves after a day. Also, I’m seeing more than a few people have odd issues like you’re having today so I can’t help but think that Twitter is broken again, and that it’s a bug, rather than a limit you hit. Give it a day, and if you still can’t follow, something else is going on – let me know as soon as you hear back from Twitter as to what they say what happened.
I don’t mind either way if you auto-follow or not. What’s most important is that Twitter lets *everyone* use Twitter the way they want to, rather than imposing the way Ev or Biz use Twitter. Restrictions like these are bring me more and more over to services like FriendFeed where I don’t have to worry about not following anyone.
My wish-list right now is what I tweeted earlier today:
In other words, continue autofollowing but unfollow anyone who autoDMs and also unfollow anyone with a default squiggly avatar. But I don’t know if the API can do that bit.
If they tweet me, I can always manually follow back. 
Thanks for the link Ari – I still chuckle sometimes about knowing you before Twitter
Did you have to do a reinstall or was it just something you decided to do? Tweetdeck settings are in the Application Data folder and you could have saved that and then copied it back over and still had all of your groups. I recently did that myself. Of course, that doesn’t answer any of your questions.
I agree that you might be analyzing things too much
And Twitter will probably sort itself out and you will be able to follow back again soon.
Kim Woodbridge´s last blog post..My 5 Favorite Articles That I’ve Written This Year
Truth be told, didn’t think about data settings for TweetDeck. I didn’t have to reinstall, but chose to due to sluggish performance and that I hadn’t reinstalled in the three years of owning it. So, in a way, I had to do it…
When I backup I include My Documents and the Application Data folder. Saves a lot of headaches if you have to reformat or reinstall a program.
3 years is a long time with Windows – is it zipping along now?
Kim Woodbridge´s last blog post..My 5 Favorite Articles That I’ve Written This Year
The computer turns on and off very quick, yes.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one facing this conundrum. One of these days I might experiment like you. Until then, I’ll manually follow back those that appear interesting or at least @ me and keep my TweetDecks groups. This post and comments gave me food for thought, but I’m not that hungry yet.
OK, you don’t have to eat. I’m about to.
Isn’t it bizarre that something so simple throws so many challenges at us? Twitter shouldn’t be giving you this kind of headache.
I manage several Twitter accounts including one for my dog
Sadie Shih Tzu (yes, my dog) and have had problems with folks (animals) she’s trying to follow – Twitter popped up with an on screen message saying she had exceeded her limit which was ridiculous. At the time she was following around 100 people and being followed by 400.
Of course I went through the motions of contacting Twitter and, of course, received no response.
Eventually this fixed itself and everything is fine now.
But still it bugs me that Twitter puts these restrictions on us AND that you have to go through the senseless process that you are.
OMIGOD! That’s the cutest thing ever…clicking over to your dog’s “friends,” and seeing their “faces” — hahaha!
You must have a lot of time on your hands!
That’s what my other half says Ari!
Seriously though Sadie has allowed me to test out lots of social media tools etc before using them on my own blog/at work. It might seem whimsical but it’s taught me a lot.
But now I just love the little Twitter animal community.
And, ok. I concede. It wouldn’t be unusual to find me in front of a computer most of the time
How can so few text characters lead to so many headaches? First, thanks for the heads-up on something I hadn’t realized… Lose tweetdeck and you have to re-enter all your groups. Yuck. Second – I like the idea of using search to create the groups you pay close attention to, but then you potentially lose close contact with the few who you always find interesting. I’m not sure there is a need to follow everyone (which I’ve been doing for the most part) when you can use search to find specific things of interest. Good discussion of the topic. Thanks.
Fred H Schlegel´s last blog post..Physics and Ideation: Creativity and Mismatched Socks
Ari,
My approach with following could be called the “benefit of the doubt” method. I auto-follow everyone – even spammers, I suppose. This is for two reasons:
1) It’s my hope that I can learn from everyone who follows me.
2) I don’t have the bandwidth to go through and hand-pick followers to follow back.
My follow policy is similar to Neal Wiser’s, but in reverse: Every couple of weeks, I’ll go though my network with a tool like http://mytweeple.com/ and unfollow folks that are not following me OR that I don’t think are a good fit (get rich quick internet folks).
This approach has been working for me – so far.
Also, I’m curious about how you’re using groups (keywords). How is it working for you?
Take care – enjoy the weather this weekend!
John
John Haydon´s last blog post..How To Selectively Integrate Your Personal And Corporate Twitter Accounts Using RSS And A Hashtag
Ari,
I think your technical problems are probably just some sort of temporary Twitter glitch, normally if your follow/follower ratio is close you should be able to go over the limits. It may be that there was just too much activity at once when you were following everybody back.
That said, it is a conundrum. My numbers are smaller than yours ( 1,343/1,404 at the moment) so I’m still following back manually. I follow most (’cept spammers and the get rich quick folk) back, but I have to admit to hesitating sometimes before hitting the “follow” button. “Why the heck is this person who believes X, Y and Z – opposite my own beliefs – following me? I wonder. Then I hit the button anyway because I’m trying to be consistent about returning follows.”
Is it the best policy? I’ve no idea. It’s opposite what I did on Pownce where I kept my list under 300. (But Pownce was more content intensive – no character limits) Like you I obviously can’t keep up with all of the Tweets. I rely heavily on my Tweetdeck groups (you’re in mktg). But I get replies from people I wasn’t really paying attention to and then get to know them, so then I’m glad I followed back. Once I’ve chatted enough with someone I then add them to a group so that I’ll catch more of their content. I also use the search columns from time to time, either to follow a hashtag or something generic like “web.” I’ve more people through the latter than I’d have expected.
I think we’re all still figuring it out. But as long as I can use a tool like Tweetdeck to narrow the focus (wish it had more columns and easier ways to add Tweeps to them) I think I’ll stick with my open follow back strategy.
Heidi Cool´s last blog post..Marketing is matchmaking: making introductions through lead generation
Twitter Comment
Interesting comentary on Twitter follow rules – [link to post]
– Posted using Chat Catcher
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I used to follow everyone who followed me, but I’ve had to become way more selective. I couldn’t keep up with the conversation, and I was getting a lot of spam and was reading stuff that simply didn’t interest me. I’ve never used any applications, I read and write directly from Twitter.
I mostly use Twitter for personal enjoyment – a way to connect with interesting people. Once in a while I drop a link to my book, blog or Squidoo lens, or items I have at CafePress, but I try to show the benefit of the link rather than a hard-sell approach.
I try to promote my friends, and share information I find interesting or newsworthy. Mostly I just try to make people feel good by sharing a laugh or a pat on the back. If I see someone having a bad day, I give them a virtual hug.
I was one of the folks you dropped and haven’t followed back, but I understand your reasoning. Twitter shouldn’t be a stress-inducer for anyone. I am actually a little sad at the growth of Twitter (I’ve been on two years) because I used to be able to have conversations with really interesting people, but the stream moves so quickly now, it’s much more difficult to catch anyone’s attention. I still enjoy Twitter, it’s just a very different experience.
I wish you all the best!
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thanks for your useful discussion.
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