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Why follow someone on Twitter?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on March 09

Adam Kmiec enumerates what he looks for in a Tweet, and why he decides to follow certain people.

I’ll add my own criteria. Like Adam, I follow people who link to interesting content. They’re like scouts. I also like humor and on-the-ground reporting. (I enjoyed Ana Marie Cox on the campaign trail, and now I see her following has ballooned to 148,000.)

I follow a few French and Spanish writers, mostly because I enjoy their sentences, and I can imagine, if only for a moment, that I’m walking across the Pont Neuf or holding up my face to the Mexican sun.

When I check someone’s page and see a lot of @ replies, I tend not to follow, because they seem to be tied up in conversations that don’t involve me. No criticism involved. It’s just a matter of what you want in the mix.

The value of followers, logically, is inverse to the number of people they follow. If someone follows 20,000, each one of our tweets races their feed in the time it takes them to blow their nose. On the other hand, my colleague Steve Hamm routinely brings up things I’ve twittered. That’s because I’m one of only 20 people he follows, a member of an exclusive club.

I imagine some Numerati-type somewhere is doing the network analysis on the value of followers. If anyone knows who’s doing it, I’d love to find out.


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Reader Comments

Sara Bonert

March 9, 2009 05:39 PM

I too used to keep my followers low, so that I wouldn't miss anything the core group of people that I really wanted to follow posted. Then I discovered TweetDeck, which allows me to group these various interest groups. This allows me to be more generous in my "following" while still keeping an eye on my favorites.

Heather Green

March 10, 2009 02:29 PM

V. funny. I have the same reaction re the @ replies, unless its someone I know really really well.

Adam Kmiec

March 10, 2009 10:25 PM

Stephen-

Have you seen this study from HP Labs? http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/twitter/twitter.pdf

Starts to get at what you are asking about.

Adam

Jon Garfunkel

March 16, 2009 08:49 AM

Steven--

Ana Marie Cox's followship was boosted a bit by Twitter's recommendations, which perturbed Dave Winer somewhat:
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3498/size-your-twitter-makes-me-feel

For Twitter stats, go to:
http://twitter.grader.com/
http://tweetstats.com/

The problem of following too much people, and wading through too many tweets, I am calling "flam":
http://bit.ly/flam

Nuzhat M Karim

March 19, 2009 04:15 PM

I used to have the same reaction to the @ replies. Until I realized I can choose not to see those in my feed. Settings -> Notices -> Show me no @ replies. Better is @replies to the people I am following (Great way to keep an eye on what your network is talking about). Because some people I follow engage in a lot of @reply conversations but also, post some very interesting articles on a regular basis. Won't want to miss those!

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In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

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