Photo: carrotcreative on Flickr

Recently I have noticed more and more people playing the twitter follow game: a rude, strategy-driven ploy to gain thousands of twitter followers in a matter of days.

Here’s the thing: you’re not fooling anyone.

If you have thousands of followers and only a couple hundred tweets, you’re either playing the twitter follow game or you’re REALLY interesting. If you’re that interesting, you can stop reading now. Thanks for coming out; I’m honoured.

If you’re mostly normal, it will take you some time to build up an authentic, conversational twitter community.

Here’s the respectable way to gain twitter followers:

Either a) I see something you said or found something in your bio and think you’re interesting, so I follow you. You then choose to follow me back or not, or b) you see something I said and think I’m interesting and so you follow me; I may then choose to follow you back. The more you tweet, the more likely I am to find something you say interesting; the reverse is also true.

Over time, as we both tweet interesting things, we grow the number of people who follow us and the number of people we follow.

Here’s the obnoxious follow game I’m talking about:

You follow me, usually as part of a batch follow of hundreds or even thousands of people at once with very little regard to relevance. I get an email in my inbox saying you followed so I check out your profile. You are at least slightly interesting if still a little new to Twitter (you’re not fooling anyone – we can tell by the absence of thousands of tweets) so out of politeness I follow back.

Sounds the same as above, right? WRONG! Here’s the rest of it…

I then get ANOTHER email saying you’re following me.

Photo: wiselywoven on Flickr

The thing I didn’t know when I followed you back was that after following ME, YOU then unfollowed, so I would get the email notification but you wouldn’t actually have to count me as one of the (limited) people you follow… then you auto-follow-back only those who followed you back.

It’s EXHAUSTING just thinking about it, and I’m now taking a hard stand against it. If you follow me twice I will deem you totally uninteresting and unfollow whether we have anything in common or not.

Those who want to connect with thousands of irrelevant people just to look important and justify the Social Media Guru titles they are giving themselves are the same people who send auto-responses with craptastic click-my-junk messages that aren’t worth the email they’re sent on. (Thank you Amber Naslund for coining the phrase – very relevant here).

That is not interesting; and it’s not community.

If you really want to build an authentic Twitter community:

• Have a photo on your Twitter Profile.
• Include a bio on your Twitter Profile that actually says something about you – what you do, hobbies, interests.
• If you’re at all inclined with Photoshop or some other such graphic program, build yourself a Twitter background. If you’re not, upload a lifestyle-type photo as a repeating background shot so the rest of Twitter can get a sense of who you are.
• Be yourself; if you try and be someone else it will show. Besides, the coolest thing about Twitter is the fact that the guy who works in insurance, loves dogs and model trains. Passionate about space photography can find other people who share those very same interests or attributes… or at least one or two of them.
• Share things that are interesting to you; if they’re interesting to you, they’ll be interesting to the people who have opted to connect with you (remember you’re being yourself).
• Be choosy about linking to your own stuff. If you must link to each blog entry, please do it without a bot i.e. introduce it to your followers with a note of interest and then for heaven’s sake, don’t tweet it out again. If it is interesting enough, people will RT it for you.
• Reply and Re-Tweet. Please. If I look at your profile and it shows that all you’re doing is musing about life in an endless stream of deep thoughts worthy of SNL circa 1990 without ever responding to anything anyone else says or posts ever, I have zero incentive to follow you back. We all know people who are that self-involved in real life; there’s no need to look for more.
• Grow your network authentically. Watch for good #followfriday listings that share a reason to follow someone – these will usually be from your own network and, therefore, you’ve got a good chance of sharing something in common anyway. Use tools like Twellow or Twitter Grader and find interesting people who share commonalities with you.
• Don’t get hung up on the numbers – friendorfollow.com is evil and doesn’t even deserve a link. There will be people you’ll want to follow who just won’t want to follow you back and that’s okay. Keep following them – don’t let your pride rob you of that information they may be sharing if you want it. Alternatively, some people may want to follow you and you look at their profile and can’t find a single thing to relate to. It’s okay not to follow back. Don’t let your ego be bruised if others feel that way about you – you are most definitely an interesting and unique person and God loves you

I love Twitter. I use it a lot. It’s a very valuable source of information for me and I also use it from a corporate perspective (that’s another post for another day). I want to keep using it and I really do want to connect with other people who share my interests.

I want to connect with corporate marketers (not self-proclaimed social media gurus), moms, adventurous women, snowboarders, runners, Christians, musicians, people living with hemophilia or any combination thereof – the more the better… all these things are in my twitter profile.

If you really have no interest in any of those things, please don’t follow me – that’s what I tweet about.

Lastly, if you are reading this and you haven’t yet joined twitter… try it. Here are some things to consider when selecting a twitter username.