Why Are You Following Me on Twitter?

Don’t you know that I’m a web developer posting geeky stuff and you’re a bar posting specials?

I joined the Twitter movement a while ago (not a first mover by any means) but have been actively using it more in recent months.  I find it useful as well as diverting.  However, I don’t want to discuss how I use it right now; what I want to focus on is a behavior that interests me.

It seems if I follow someone, mention anyone by name, or tweet on a topic of interest once, there’s a reflex for people to follow me.  This doesn’t happen all the time, but happens often enough that it bears examining.  Why would someone do this?

• if I posted once on a topic of interest, I might post again
• it’s easier to follow and then unfollow than it is to read my twitterstream and see if I’m actually worth following
• I might follow someone who follows me, and followers are good
• Someone might know me (online or offline) and a tweet might have alerted them to my presence on twitter
• Someone might have seen my tweet, clicked through to my profile, and thence to my website, read a couple (or all :)) of my posts, considered whether or not I might have more of interest to say, and followed me.

Those are the main reasons I can think of.  Did I miss any? Oh, and the last couple are improbable, based on my web stats.

I think it’s early in the Twitter game, especially for the pragmatists (Twitter having crossed the chasm), and it feels like the early days of my RSS reader (when I first discovered the wonderful world of blogs).  Any time I stumbled upon a blog that had an interesting post, I added the blog’s feed to my RSS reader.  Eventually, I was following hundreds of blogs.  For a while, I kept up, reading the new posts diligently, but because of real life and work, I fell behind.  Now, I rarely open Bloglines–I know which blogs I want to check out and just visit them directly.

I think the same thing can happen to your twitter home page–if you add people indiscriminately (or even slightly discriminately) you risk polluting it and decreasing its value.  Note that I don’t use any of the tools built around Twitter.  They may help manage this issue–and I hope they do.

Because it is so easy to follow people on Twitter (easier, in fact, than determining whether it would be worthwhile to follow them), it’s also easy to clutter up your experience.  In the end, I believe this clutter will either drive you away from Twitter, or force you to spend time unfollowing (or, as Dion put it, “gardening”).

[tags]twitter, crossing the chasm, social media[/tags]