Twitter recently released Lists,
allowing you to organize the people you follow into groups.
It’s something I’ve dabbled with on my own twitter account:
After attending a B2B event and following many of the participants- it seemed a natural course to put them all in a B2B list. It was easy enough to create the new list by clicking “New List” in the right column of the main page in Twitter. Then I went to the page of the people I was following (http://twitter.com/following) and added each of the B2B folks to my new list. To add the person I click on the first of the two option buttons next to each of the people I was following.
The result is a list of savvy B2B professionals: http://twitter.com/CaseyChesh/b2b
Yeah! Hooray! Yehaw! Huzzah.
Lists work great, they’re fine and dandy.
The real topic of this post is not the Lists themselves, but the effect they may have on the way people use Twitter.
Out there in the Twitter universe you’ll find people with 2 follows and others with over 50,000. Top followed accounts will be in the millions! Then general rule with a lot of people- even people I admire and respect, is that Quantity is the name of the game with Twitter. In order to get many followers, they follow thousands! It’s also generally accepted (for non-celebrities) to follow back anyone who follows you (as long as they’re not just SPAM).
More is Less
I'll trade you 100 pennies for your one $5 bill.
The problem with quantity is that the more people you follow, the less you’re following each person. If you follow 3 people, when they Tweet, you’ll be sure to see what they have to say if you check your Twitter account regularly. Follow 30 people, and now you’re cooking. You should have several tweets every few hours.
At the time of this post I follow 210 people. Prior to the B2B conference it was under 200 and even with that
Can you keep up with the Matrix?
many people, I was largely overwhelmed. I knew I wouldn’t be able to read every Tweet. This poses the challenge. How much value do you place on individuals that you follow? No doubt some are more important than others.
There are several people that I follow who don’t tweet too often, but when they do it’s usually important and something I definitely want to read. As the number of people I follow goes up, the chance of me missing an important tweet also increases. With 200+ people tweeting, I’m left with a Stream of Information. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if that’s what you’re looking for.
It wasn’t what I was looking for, so for a long time I have culled (cool word) back the people I follow.
There are 3 things that have caused me to recently shift my view of the best practice for following:
- Twitter’s introduction of Lists
- Many colleagues and peers with large numbers of followers/follows.
- My adoption of Google Reader for reading RSS Feeds.
The use of Google Reader is critical. It has become my Knowledge Tool, replacing what Twitter use to be. And with my need for news/learning satisfied (you can say that again!), ensuring that I see the most important tweets from certain people is no longer as important. RSS Feeds / Google Reader have allowed me to view Twitter more as a broadcasting tool.
Tweets <———–>Tweets is now replaced by Tweets ————–> Tweets
While this is potentially a good thing for me in terms of personal branding, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing for Twitter. Which brings us back around to their introduction to Lists. Lists will allow us to continue to add to our Follow numbers with the illusion that we’ll be able to keep up. (Many pros don’t keep up and use it as a broadcasting tool, others will hire people to manage it.)
I wonder if Twitter could be saved by limiting the number of people you can follow.
A controversial point! We’ll save that one for another post.
In conclusion, the number of Tweet broadcasters increase and Twitter has a fundamental need for Tweet consumers. I look forward to seeing how the service evolves!
