Jeff Sandstrom’s Blog

Back to Twitter Basics

Jan 21

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I was inspired to write this post after read­ing a recent entry on Fan​boy.com titled, “Social Media ‘Experts’ are the Cancer of Twit­ter (and Must Be Stopped).”

I started using Twit­ter in Octo­ber 2008. I’m a geek who fol­lows the tech scene pretty closely, so I’ve been aware of Twit­ter for a long time; how­ever, since none of my friends were using it, I saw no reason to par­tic­i­pate (I didn’t think “taking a crap,” or “watch­ing a hockey game” would be remotely inter­est­ing tweets for anyone, even my clos­est friends). But now that I’ve been using it for a few months, I love it! I’ve had a lot of fun fol­low­ing tech blog­gers and pod­cast­ers whom I’ve been read­ing and listen to for the past few years. Even though I’ve never met them, I feel like we could grab a beer and have a lot to talk about.

But a couple weeks ago, I decided I wanted to start lever­ag­ing Twit­ter for my employ­ment search. So I set out to grow my number of fol­low­ers (the more fol­low­ers I had, the more people I could net­work with for my job search). I started fol­low­ing people that were retweeted and replied to by people I’d already been fol­low­ing, and within four or five days, my fol­lower count had dou­bled! And of course I felt com­pelled to follow those that were fol­low­ing me - that’s just common Twit­ter courtesy.

And the result of this project to increase fol­low­ers? Misery. I now hate read­ing Twit­ter updates. My feed is full of junk from people who love to hear them­selves talk (or see them­selves type)…the hype machines with no substance…human marshmallows…the people who only care about get­ting as…many…Twitter…Followers…as…possible. (Anyone else pick­ing up on the irony here?)

So it’s time to get back to basics. Time to prune the list of people I follow. I expect my fol­lower list to drop as I prune, but that’s okay. Over time, maybe the number of people fol­low­ing me will grow, maybe it won’t. If it does, I hope it’s because of my con­tent and not because they simply expect me to follow them back.

p.s. If you’re look­ing for great Twit­ter con­tent, try fol­low­ing HotAmishChick. I have no idea who the writer is, but he/she is absolutely hysterical!