I received an email the other day to my personal account from someone that’s been following me on twitter for some time now. This person asked me why I haven’t chosen to follow them back. It’s a fair question I suppose. Especially, given that twitter lately seems to be about who can amass the largest number of followers.
People have even started adopting tools and techniques to let them auto follow you back after you’ve followed them. Geez, I’m flattered 
Seriously, think about it. This person has no idea who I am, what I do, or why I even followed them. Yet, they decided it was really important to instantly follow me back. Huh?
I guess everyone is taking the advice Guy Kawasaki gave to me here and simply believing that there’s no such thing as too many followers. He never responded to my tongue in cheek response about Nazi Germany, but I imagine it’s hard to sift through all the responses he gets.
I’m not a collector of followers. Does my twitter Grader score of 99.5 mean anything when you consider that DarthVader’s is 99.94? Seriously, these things really don’t matter to me, and yet somehow they have become semi-important pieces of evaluative data. I don’t follow you back because you’ve elected to follow me. Sorry, just like the Punch Buggy game, there are no punch backs
OK – you’ve listened to me whine about the problem long enough. I appreciate that. Before we get to the good stuff, let me be upfront in telling you that my approach changes frequently. I found the need to keep updating as twitter continued to grow. So who do I follow? At a high level the people I follow fall into the following categories:
Companies: I don’t follow every company. I tend to follow the ones that are the most active or most innovative. Seeing how these companies are using this still very young platform helps me understand what’s possible. On a lot of levels they are a great set of petri dishes. I can observer, learn, and apply the knowledge.
Link Sharers: These people are like my personal RSS feed. They bring the best of the web to twitter. This reduces the amount of time and effort I need to expend on learning and staying current. Part of my job is to be on top the latest, greatest, best, worst, newest, and most innovative. These people help me do that. One thing to keep in mind is that news outlets like AdAge would also fall into this category.
Friends: Pretty simple. These are people who I have a professional or personal relationship with. Often this is a pre-existing relationship.
Engagers: The great thing about twitter is that anyone can engage anyone (unless of course you block your updates). A large majority of the people I follow are these folks. Over time, after enough quality interactions, I convert and start following.
Random Curiosity: This group is primarily made up of celebrities, actors, musicians, politicians, etc. Many rarely tweet. Many have a handler doing the tweeting for them. But, I find these people very interesting. I think it’s the hope or anticipation of a cool, funny, unique, or interesting tweet. The nice think about following these people is that they don’t clutter your follower stream because of how infrequently they engage.
That’s it. I don’t think it’s anything groundbreaking or breakthrough. In fact, it’s damn simple. If you aren’t doing one of the above I won’t be following you. Now that you know what it takes, will you do any of it?
As an added bonus, here’s a list of people I think are worth following. Enjoy.
