One thing that has always perplexed me about Twitter, and continues to do so, is the expectation of some Tweeters that if they randomly follow me, I'm going to follow them back.
I'm not. I don't care about you.
The beauty of Twitter, for me, is seeking out the crowd that interests you, looking for the conversations that add value, where you can contribute nuggets, or answer questions, and generally inveigle yourself in, and make some new friends. It's just heartwarming...
You know that there are millions of other conversations going on out there. Somewhere, Ashton just shared his thoughts on Demi's bum to thousands of rapt devotees. I'm not one of them. Stephen Fry quips 140 character anecdotes about swimming in an indonesian skirt. How nice. And then there are the industry chats.
Once I downloaded TweetDeck, I became a devotee of Twitter. Following #PR, #energy, #commodities, #dubai streams gave me an insight in to a number of valuable conversations. It is my favoured news monitor service, with articles pre-read and actively recommended by strangers whose opinions you grow to trust.
However, the minute you start contributing to these feeds, you become visible to millions of others also tracking that feed. Many of these seem to have the old fashioned view that the whole point of the app is building a massive follower base, by following masses of people. I don't get it. If you follow 2,000 people, how on earth do you hear what anyone is saying?
Even on reputable forums such as LinkedIn, where I'm a member of a Twitter forum (for discussion between PR professionals on how best to use the app in corporate comms), there are people advocating the use of auto-follow tools, to just link on to anyone you can, in the hope of building your numbers.
The point is, both in my own personal twittage, and the plan that I'm developing for the company, I'm not that bothered if we end up with 3m followers or 30, as long as we can have relevant and interesting conversations with the people active on the application who shape industry conversations on Twitter.
It's a waste of my energy going and blocking strange characters who decide to follow me, in the vain hope that I'll follow them back. I have blocked one person, who seemed to take issue with anything I tweeted, and send public, nasty, disparaging tweets in response, even when they didn't contain a #tag. To me, that kind of behaviour is just childish, in any forum, whether online or off.
I may be wrong though. I'm attending the MEPRA Twitter workshop on Sunday (held here at the DME - spot the plug!) to find out. We shall see what Spot On PR, the illustrious Twitter gurus, have to say on the matter of managing their own mah-u-sive fan base.
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