The Reciprocators
These are the guys like Robert Scoble who just reciprocate all follower requests they get. Now, the problem with this is you don’t really know who you are following. If 20,000 people decide to follow me that’s great but do I have to follow them? Of course not, there are a lot of folks on twitter who create a lot of noise. Folks that like to share every detail of their life or every event. Do I want to know what you are eating? Not really. Follow people that you want to engage in conversation with or folks that you have a genuine interest in. Now too be fair it can also be argued that folks like Scoble are just interested in EVERYONE, point noted.
The Spammers and Attention Whores
These are the folks that go around trying to follow as many people as they can in hopes that the “follow” will be reciprocated. A lot of these twitter users are spammers that haven’t figure out the utility of twitter. Others are just blatant attention seekers who are trying to get as many twitter followers as they can. The problem with this approach is that the focus is on quantity and not quality. The spammers want as many followers a possible so that they can begin pushing out their content. There is limited quality discussion and interaction here.
The Minimalists or Conversationalists
These are the guys that are pretty conservative with whom they follow. I would most likely group myself in this category. I want to follow people who provide some sort of value or interesting discussion, this doesn’t mean that if I’m not following you I don’t think you’re interesting, it just means that I am trying to keep my follow limit to a relatively small number so I don’t have to skip and chase tweets. I also do this so that I can engage in quality discussions and interactions with people, there is just no way to do this when you are following everyone. Take for example Loren Feldman, recently he “un-followed” almost all of his followers because he said he wanted to engage in actual discussions, this means that he will only talk to you if you use the ‘@’ to send him a reply. Personally this strikes me a very 1 way discussion, meaning it’s a “I will talk to you if you talk to me first” approach. Kevin Rose also has a very limited amount of people that he follows, despite being one of the most followed twitter users with around 50,00 followers.
What other types of twitter follower groups woud you add to this? Did I miss anything?
Thanks for reading
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