Why I won’t follow everyone on Twitter

This is a guest post by Chris Guthrie. Check out our guest posting guidelines.

I’ve read the past few articles written about Twitter here on Blog Godown and I wanted to toss my hat into the ring as well with another perspective on Twitter. The articles I’m referring to include the debate over scheduling tweets or not and how to treat your Twitter followers. I don’t agree with everything that’s been said in these articles and wanted to provide my opinion as well to see what you think.

Why I won’t follow everyone on Twitter

I have a small number of followers at just over 100 as of this posting and I follow even less people at just 25 right now. The reason why I don’t follow everyone that follows me is not because I don’t feel grateful that they’ve cared enough to follow me, but because I don’t believe it’s possible to have a relationship with everyone of my followers. So rather than attempt to do it by following the 100 people that follow me I’d rather just set the precedence now that I won’t be able to follow everyone. Perhaps I’m not the best example because I only have 100 followers, but I believe my point still stands. Facebook sets a limit of 5,000 friends and although this is more likely due to a technical limitation I think it’s because they also believe you can’t truly have a personal connection to more than 5,000 people. Yes you might write a blog read by thousands and thousands of people but do you read their blogs too? Do you meet up with them at conferences and eat meals together? What can you truly do to maintain connection to your 1,000 followers? 10,000 followers? 100,000 followers? I don’t believe you can and in fact I know that the users with accounts like these do not.

The reason why utilities like Tweet Deck cropped up in the first place was that users needed a way to be able to manage the huge influx of information on Twitter. One of these problems was an inability to sort out which people you want to read updates from and which you don’t ever want to see. Now of course you can simply NOT follow everyone, but people don’t want to do this because they believe it’s not possible to get a very large group of followers if they don’t. So instead they create lists of people that they actually care to see updates from and the rest of their followers are just there to pad their stats. If you were to follow me on Twitter than I may follow you back, but I’d need to interact with you in some way or be connected to the stories that you write and share to consider following you. Otherwise what’s the point except to add another digit to my follower count?