Wednesday 17 November 2010

The Ins and Outs of Following on Twitter

Following is one of the simplest things to do on Twitter. You find someone who you know or looks interesting, and you click the “follow” button. Thereafter you see their tweets in your list (timeline). That’s it.

Well not quite!

Following is a lot more powerful than that, and has a number of pitfalls to watch out for.....

Direct Messages

If someone follows you, you can send them a “Direct Message” (starting DM @username). This is private, and is omitted from the full public timeline and the timeline for your own account (which publicly shows all tweets, including replies, that are not DMs). They can only send a DM to you if you follow them.


Conversely, if you follow then they can send you DMs. You may therefore wish to be selective about who you follow, though this is rarely a problem. You can always "unfollow" if necessary, as below.

Following for Profit

Some people are fanatical about how many people follow them. For people like celebrities from the TV, that’s understandable, as the bigger their audience the better, for when they are publicising their latest show or book.

The same applies to other people with a blog to promote or something to sell.

Other people will follow you simply to bring themselves to your attention, with no real interest in what you have to say. Indeed following people is potentially a good attention technique, if you have suitable details and links in your profile.

Follow-backs

Many people expect you to follow the if they follow you - a "follow-back". Perhaps you’re not interested. If they know you, will they be offended?

Some people set up a system to automatically follow back. And/or they can automatically send a reply or DM to each new follower, with a thank you and perhaps a web link for whatever they are trying to sell or promote. But people don’t like being sold at, especially on Twitter, so it needs to be done with care. Something useful, perhaps free, if anything.

Un-Following

If you lose interest in someone you follow, you can unfollow as easily as following them.
But how will they react? You have to assume they’ll notice!

Private Tweeting

You can set up an account so that people can only follow you if you approve them. This can be useful for any group or club, but also helps you control who sees your tweets.

Go to Settings, Account, Tweet Privacy and "Protect my tweets". This can be done at the outset or at any time, but will not stop previous tweets appearing publicly in some systems.

In particular this prevents “bots” that automatically try to follow people joining Twitter or tweeting certain words, if that bothers you. This is only used rarely.

Blocking

Some people reply to your public tweets. Replies can be humorous, or be useful, such as answering a question you pose.

But  some people’s replies become a pain, or just plain abusive. By “blocking” them, not only will they not routinely be sent your tweets, but they will no longer be able to address any tweet to you.

Follow Friday

To help each other build a list of followers, it has become traditional on a Friday to send out a list of people you recommend to follow, by adding the hashtag #ff or #followfriday. This can be done in one of three main ways:
  • A list of @usernames in one or more tweets
  • One @username per tweet, with some justification for the request
  • Including a link in a tweet to a list you’ve set up on another web site, possibly with reasons,
Any of these approaches is very public, so leave people out at you peril. One way is to only #ff people with whom you have had some positive interaction that week, but that requires keeping records!

Doing #ff’s properly can also be time consuming. An alternative approach is to thank anyone that includes you in their #ff list by tweeting their @username publicly with the #ff still in the text. Putting any character before the @username means all your followers will see it.

People following a multitude of people

To curtail automated following systems and other people only following for attention, there is a limit of following 2000 people, unless you are also being followed by a significant number of poeple. 2000 is more than enough for a normal user.  

Some people follow a large number of people, into hundreds and even thousands. This can simply be that they want to bring themselves to those people’s attention, blindly follow back everyone, or follow every new interest that comes to their attention.


That inevitably means that they don’t read the vast majority of the tweets they receive. If they follow you, they probably won’t see your public tweets. If you want their attention, you have to send a tweet with their @username in it, or send them a DM