Twitter: The Follower Game
By David Fisher. Filed in social media |Tags: fail, follower, friends, game, grader, karma, numbers, rank, ratio, spam, spammers, twitter
Twitter, the CB-Radio of the internet, has become a follower numbers game for many. Everyone has to play a bit, but some people are living and breathing the game.
The end goal for man
y is to have more “Followers”, that is people that hear what you say, on Twitter. Having a larger number of followers gives to a degree more credibility, gives greater ability to spread ideas or products, and often overall makes you feel pretty good. Then again, some people just want to spam you with their company’s failed social media attempts.
At first, some tried following a ton of people, some upwards of 50,000, in hopes that 10-20% of those would follow them back, and would give them a strong following to spread their message. This started looking bad, and having a poor “ratio” often would be indicative of a spammer. This lead toward the faux pas of following too many people and having such a ratio or you too would be considered a spammer. Oh yea, and Twitter started banning them. This has been further reinforced by things like Hubspot’s Twitter Grader, which rewards people with a higher grader if they follow significantly less people than follow them (among other things). Keep in mind that at the end of the day this causes a pyramid scheme like stack, if the act of following/being followed is a currency, where the ‘top’ people have put the least into it but have gained the most, and the people at the bottom have put the most in but gained the least.
Now, new tools have been developed which have only perpetuated this game. When Twitter was young curating 10,000 people that you’ve followed and seeing if they had followed you back was tedious. Now with something like Twitter Karma you can quickly look at everyone following you, and all of the people that you follow and check for reciprocation of the follow. However, another tool is helping alert people of this activity: Qwitter.
Qwitter lets you see who has unfollowed you. At first this might seem useless, or vain but its neat to notice and catch people who are trying to game the system. Everyone at first says, “Oh, no one unfollows me, all of my followers love me and what I say.” They soon find that isn’t true.
Here’s the new game I’ve noticed: Since having much worse than a 1:1 Follower:Friend ratio on Twitter is looked down on and often prevents people from following them back (making the problem even worse), the spammers and spam-like people follow a bunch of people, maybe 200, and then wait two days. They then use something like Twitter Karma and unfollow anyone that hasn’t followed them back. They then have a perfect ratio again! They rinse and repeat, following another large groups of people. If you’re using Qwitter you can catch them. Not that you can do anything about it, asides from maybe contribute to some Twitter Blacklist (well, that one is close now but whatever) but at least it makes you feel good that you didn’t follow them back.
There’s many downsides to this numbers game however. Some of us like a large stream of information. I honestly wish I was following 2-3x as many people as I’m following now, just so at 2am the conversation would still be flowing around me. Its not overwhelming as long as you’re using a good client that supports groups like TweetDeck. I hope that people follow me back, and I like having a healthy and engaged following, yet I don’t want to tip the social norms and be seen as a spammer. Twitter already banned my account once mistaking me for a spammer and I’d prefer to not have such allegations or mistakes made again.
Also, keep in mind that this turns it into a game- not a conversation. Conversations aren’t numbers. People aren’t numbers. Having a ‘killer ratio’ doesn’t matter. People who are only following back 100 people, but having 75,000 people following them aren’t engaged in the conversation (I’m looking at you Kevin Rose). They are there for their own celebrity. People who play the follow/unfollow/spam game on Twitter aren’t in the conversation with you either. Don’t follow them back, and don’t worry when they unfollow you. They don’t care what you have to say, only that you listen to them.
What do you think of the numbers game that Twitter has become for many? Are there any rules you play by? Are there any rules you break?
UPDATE: I just saw a great discussion going on at http://canwetalkpr.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/why-does-social-media-sometimes-feel-like-a-popularity-contest about social media being like a popularity contest. Very similar topic. Over 10 comments already.
I was hoping you’d write about this!–I think the other issue is there are two types of people who can have “favorable ratios.”
1) Those who play the numbers game (like you stated above) and purge their follower list to maintain that ratio.
And 2) Those who have been on Twitter for nine months or more who have organically grown an exceptional amount of followers just by tweeting cool things.
It’s too bad; I think the number 1) category is seriously diluting the credibility of group 2). What will be the new way to discover the Twitter elite?
Your points are mostly right. Yet regarding #2 I think that some of the people with “killer” ratios like @KevinRose or @leahculver (far in excess of 1:100 ratios each) are just ignoring most of the rest of the world. They are on Twitter to seem accessible, but yet they don’t really listen to anyone else. It’s about people being good at listening AND talking. People who follow almost no one back aren’t very good at listening.
You have to ask, why wouldn’t you follow someone who had taken the time to express an interest in what you have to say by following you? If you use FriendorFollow.com to discover someone who has 6,000 followers including you, and follows 6,000 people but *not* you, why not unfollow them? Twitter artificially constrains the number of people you( a mere mortal) can follow to 2,000 so you eventually have to treat your “follow tokens” as a limited commodity and use them on people that return the follow.
@stiennon
I wasn’t aware that Twitter had a limit of people you could follow, as I know a lot of people that follow significantly more (@pistachio and @chrisbrogan for example each follow in excess of 10,000). Is this something new that they have imposed?
There’s a handful of reasons that I don’t follow some people back. Sometimes I get busy for a few days, and don’t get back with everyone instantly. I’ve had rushes of 50-60 followers within a day or so and sorting them all out can be time consuming and if other things in life come up, well… Twitter isn’t always the #1 priority. I actually blogged about that a few weeks ago. I do follow most people back, but not all, and not all of them fast enough. (link: http://whatisnoise.com/2008/11/why-i-didnt-follow-you-back-on-twitter.html) I’m convinced that not everyone that follows me is actually interested in hearing what I have to say if they unfollow me an hour later and are clearly just looking to rack up their numbers.
Hey, David! Great post, and thanks for linking to mine!
I think we’ve all been on the receiving end of a purge at one point or another. I’m making it a point now to really scrutinize people who request to follow me. Do they want to have a conversation or are they just hoping to round up more followers? The easiest way (sometimes) to tell is by looking at the first few pages of their Twitter stream. I don’t approve every request.
It’s hard. It’s very hard to try to have a conversation with everyone and when someone unfollows me, I think it’sbecause we didn’t find the opportunity to converse. I feel bad about it to an extent, yeah, but we all have our different reasons for moving on. Friendships - relationships are never static. Yet, it puzzles me how those who do follow the masses can manage to have real conversations. I don’t think they can.
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