The World of Twitter Can Get Mean

I am assuming that both of you who read my blog, know that I am on Twitter. I am up to about 5,600 followers. I mostly do it for marketing of my CPA practice, but honestly it is kind of fun. I consider Twitter like an huge ongoing conversation or maybe with 5,600 conversations going on it is more like a giant cocktail party. I will say for the skeptics that from a marketing standpoint it does work, because I have found new business from Twitter. There are a few regulars that I converse back and forth with and I try as best as I can to keep up with them, but obviously there is no way I really keep up with 5,600 people. If someone follows me, then I follow them back and the whole thing has just kind of grow organically.

Kim Kardashian is reported to be one of the most influential people on Twitter, supposedly she receives $10,000 per tweet to advertise for a site called Ad.ly. One of the ways your Twitter influence is measured is the ratio of people who follow you to people you follow. This has created a large number of Kim "wannabes", who spend a significant amount of time following people and then immediately un-following them. It works too, because for me personally I get an email telling me when someone starts following me, but unless I go to one of the Twit service sites online, I don't usually know when someone stops following me.

It, in fact, really did not hit me until earlier this year how much this was happening to me and so I did start monitoring my un-followers. It is pretty easy to identify them, because they will have several thousand followers, but not many people they follow and most of their posts will either be benign quotes from people who are dead or will provide links to a website that will set you up for life with a residual income stream.

You can use a site like FriendorFollow and find out who you follow that does not follow you back. I started keeping a list on Twitter of un-followers. Like I said Twitter to me is a conversation and my definition of conversation means it's a two way street. If I am the only one listening, then the conversation has stopped and you are just advertising to me. Sure advertising is one of the main reasons I am there, but I listen to your ad in exchange for you listening to mine. And let's be honest here do I really care what 5,600 people have to say? I probably care what about 1% of them have to say and know that maybe 1% of them are really listening to me. I have to hope we stumble upon each other at just the right time. (It is cheaper than mailing out a bunch of postcards, you get the same response rate and it doesn't kill as many trees!)

So I tell you all this to get to the point of today. One of the people I put on the list, noticed and I guess was not too happy about it. I get this tirade of @ reply's about how I am the Twitter hall monitor and should spend more time doing accounting work and she can un-follow anyone she wants.

First off here is my evidence:
1. She followed me and then within a day was no longer following me
2. She has about 800 people following her, but only follows a little over 60

Now before you jump to the same conclusions I did and say well she is obviously guilty and got called out, here is more to the story as I actually took time to look at her status updates and think about the situation.

#1. She actually noticed that I put her on the list of un-followers. I have been doing this for months and she is the first Tweeter to notice or at least admit they noticed.

#2. As I read her timeline, it appears that she is using Twitter for its original purpose, which is sending quick updates to people who actually care and conversing with people you actually know.

#3. I am making some assumptions here (I was already accused of making ASSumptions)but she has a website that sounds like it might be selling something, but the link does not work and it appears that she may have recently used a mass un-follow tool to dump a bunch of the folks she followed. That leads me to conclude that she thought about using Twitter to market her goods, but after going down that road a little bit decided she was more of a Twitter purist and wanted to get back to just conversing with the people she actually cares about.

So in the end I took her off the list. Even if just because she was so upset about being on the list. I mean it's Twitter, I would hate to think I ruined somebody's day over Twitter.

The lessons for today are

1. In a fast paced world we make quick judgments about things and sometimes our judgments are wrong.
2. A bunch of capitalists can take take something as benign as Twitter and pervert its use to try and make a buck off it.

Now excuse me while I go and try to get a bigger list of followers.