Booksquare University

In the past few days, I’ve had a rash of new followers. I mean, I get a healthy number of followers on a regular basis, but these are different. They don’t make any sense. I’m being followed by people who cannot possibly have any interest in me, what I have to say, and what I do.

They’re engaged in the Twitter equivalent of a fishing expedition, hoping I’ll follow back without thinking twice. No, sorry. I won’t. Chances are, I’m going to block you before I follow you.

Harsh? Maybe, but it’s time for a reality check. If your approach to Twitter is to follow as many people as possible, hoping they’ll follow you back, you’re doing it wrong. What is the point of having a 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, or even a million followers if they’re not listening? You don’t get a prize for having large numbers of followers.

The average lifespan of a tweet is five minutes and surely shrinking. That’s not a whole lot of time when it comes to sending a marketing message. But it gets worse. You only make an impact if your message is actually read. Go back, look at the people who “follow” you. How many of them are a) engaged in Twitter to the point where they’re reading every word, b) following so many people, all inbound messages are a blur, or c) still using Twitter after their initial rush of excitement?

(Hint: most of the people who auto-follow everyone who follows them aren’t reading 99.99% of their inbound messages. Savvy folk use applications that allow them to “group” followers so they only see people they want to see. Less savvy users are overwhelmed by volume and ignore it all. Oh and it seems the only people who believe this approach works are “marketing experts” who sell this stuff to wanna-be marketers. It’s a self-perpetuating circle.)

If you’re not using Twitter to engage in conversation (conversation, by the way, is not pushing yourself and product non-stop), why are you there? The people who have adopted Twitter, who love it, who use it regularly are also the people who automatically block marketers, spammers, and all-around annoying people. They simply do not have patience for people who think it’s okay to ruin the experience…yeah, talking to you, marketer, who @ messages me with spam. You are blocked so fast!

And yes, being blocked is bad. Enough people do it to you, and it alerts the Twitter police. They hate spam as much as the rest of us. They have the power to stop you.

In other words, sure you have followers, but do they care? Which makes me ask: why are you so intent on quantity over quality?