More on Twitter Followers

The other day I wrote a post on on how my attitude on Twitter followers has changed with time.

This article elicited some favorable feedback so I oblige my readership and explore this some more. The tool I have used most recently is called Twitter Karma. Twitter Karma has a pretty decent interface on showing you who follows you, who you follow, and mutual follows.

As I said in the last post, I no longer automatically rfollow. I look at the person following and evaluate on a number of my interests, goals, and the overall value of that person.

I have found that there are a number of categories tweeps can fall into.

1. The social media expert tweep.

— these people are hoping to get you to follow them because they want to entice you into hiring them or retaining their services as social media experts. I have a number of them following me, both near and far. The thing is, what is a social media expert? Are there established best practices yet? I think everyone of us who is active on Twitter can probably qualify as an SM expert that is, no one is.

2. The Pearls of Wisdom tweep

— nothing original, they dig up quotes with a wise sound to them and blast them out. The quotes can be inspirational but we all know various places we can go to for inspiration.

3. The news tweep

— They tend to specialize in a news area and just tweet current events news stories. I follow a couple of these, one tweets on sports stories (mostly), another on ski stories and mostly sports related stuff. News tweeps often feature paid-tweets, which I don’t mind, but guys, keep it fresh please, I don’t need to see 15 times a month how you think the commercial featuring talking kittens is so funny.

4. Service X tweep

— I get these a lot, mostly real estate agents from ski resort hot spots. Would love to follow real estate agent X in Aspen, Taox, or Jackson Hole. However, a follow is all you will get and no leads will come from having me follow you. In addition, I have all sorts of other shops, HVAC, lingerie (?), and some I can not recall of right now.

5. Traditional spam tweeps

— They hope to get your clicks and money before Twitter banishes them! Yes, the traditional spam we all get via e-mail also pop up on Twitter from time to time. Fortunately, Twitter is very very good about policing them and they rarely last long enough for me to report them as spam.

6. One on One Networking tweeps

— The ideal, those looking to establish and grow personal networks.

7. Mixed mode tweeps

— Most of us fall into this one. I am quite honestly trying to sell you on this site and my writing, but just as important I want to establish as many win-win relationships as I can. Most of my tweeps fall into this one as well, they are trying to sell a service but are not afraid to seek out others in their industry (in my case ski & snow sports) to help establish mutually beneficial relations.