You’re right that there’s a set of complementary strategies that can work. I tend to favor organic growth because it tends to lead to more durable relationships than, say, following back because someone followed you. By being part of the conversation rather than just following people in the hope that they’re receptive to messages, businesses will be making relationships with those who find them truly relevant. I don’t see a better way to achieve that quality of relationship by touring around and following people for the sake of building an audience.

I took a look at some #wontfollow tweets and found them instructive to the people they are directed to: saying that one won’t follow back because one isn’t interested in overt pitches or ‘advice’ on growing follower numbers is not only legitimate, it’s helpful to those on the receiving end to see where they’re missing the mark. Like anything, one can be a haughty jerk with that same hashtag and then it does become sad.

“The most important thing for me on any Web 2.0 platform is to maintain and continue the conversation.”

Exactly. Great post, Raul. I suppose my thoughts on Twitter are as follows:

#1. Twitter is fluid and everyone uses it differently. I am getting really bored of people imposing their own very arbitrary rules for using it and then acting negatively when people don’t follow them.

#2. I could care less about who follows me. Seriously. I am who I am and I Tweet what I Tweet–follow me or don’t, whatever. I only check my followers list maybe once per week and I only follow those back who actually seem interesting to me–we do similar work or I look over their Tweets and discover they write with some flair. Following me is no guarantee I will reciprocate and I don’t expect any different from anyone else.

If a business chooses to follow me then great, my Tweets are theirs to deal with. Hopefully they are a company I already interact with and by reading and following the day-to-day hopes, observations and complaints of a customer they’ve already engaged then they can use that information to make my experience with their product or service that much better. I work in user experience so I will admit I’m fascinated with the idea of Twitter as a window into users and their behaviour but that’s a whole other topic I won’t get into here.

If learning about me as a customer isn’t a company’s intent then again: Whatever. I agree with Todd, I’m pretty sure your brand name showing up on someone’s list of Followers has negligible value. They’re really only wasting their own time and it doesn’t negatively impact me or my use of Twitter whatsoever.

The bottom line is that all social media is really about conversation and communication and negativity is not conducive to conversation. You’re hardly going to speak up when there’s a risk someone will bite your head off. The people who do well within this space are those that are best at facilitating and keeping the conversation going. Keeping things rolling means understanding that not everything is black and white and actually listening and discussing. I hear a lot of people talk about how Twitter is “all about listening” but they really don’t practice what they preach. Castigating someone for following you or not using Twitter the way you randomly want them to is useless. Perhaps the instigators of #wontfollow or #nofollow mean to be helpful by attempting to increase the quality of Tweets but ultimately everyone’s definition of what is or isn’t a quality Tweet or reasons for following or not following someone are so varied that all this ends up doing is introducing conversation killing negativity to the mix. It doesn’t work.

This post is why I follow you!
Real people and real relationships take time. While I occasionally do “follow fridays”, I always find myself well within the 140 character limit when I do so!
Take care and have a great weekend!

Thanks for this post Raul. I agree with your comments about cutting some Twitterers some slack. I’d like to think I’ve used the #wontfollow tag only when I encounter an egregious Twitter fail. Otherwise, I’ll use a “Twitter Tip” or something like that.

Wilde said “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity” and I admit I have a low tolerance for insincerity: repetitive marketing messages with no other content (spam), or no posts at all, no bio, no picture, yet following hundreds (at least make a post saying you enjoy listening in but aren’t much of a talker – I can respect that. Otherwise you’re just a lurker).

I’d like to think the #wontfollow tag is a learning tool for new and uncertain Twitterers; a repository of worst practices, or an opinion dataset perhaps; information to be used (or dismissed) by the curious.

Also, as you know, I enjoy conversation but I also enjoy a debate. One person’s “negativity” is another’s juicy provocation.

I’ve given up on #followfriday too – for exactly the same reasons you mentioned! When I talk to new Twitterers, I simply advise them to go mine followees from people they find interesting, and let it snowball from there.

I totally agree! And this is why I follow you.

I also believe that it is important to follow people that you think you can build a relationship with.

Displaying the number of followers/following definitely can push things towards a popularity contest, but I’m glad that you seem to value (as do I) why Twitter is so awesome in the first place. Connecting with new, and old friends!

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Because of its rarity, one of the more valuable forms of information on Twitter is info about people your friends have followed for a while but no longer follow (let’s face it, learning that yet another account is owned by a bottom-feeding traffic-troll with no interesting content is not news; you tend to discover that pretty quickly).

As a result, i propose #unfollowfriday, where you mention one person who you have been following, who isn’t a totally illegit troll, and who you have decided to unfollow recently.

Socially awkward? No doubt. But you are doing an enormous service to people in your twitter network by both encouraging people to have higher-quality twitter networks and by encouraging the laggards to improve their performance.

The fact that everyone has a different metric for twitter quality is not especially important: you would listen to the #unfollows of people you trust, people whose taste is similar to yours, and people whose tastes are sufficiently different that they act as anti-recommenders for you.

Thanks all for chiming in. I don’t think I can add much more to the discussion other than I have the loveliest and smartests readers

I don’t think I could ever bring myself to the kind of public shaming of an #unfollow. Rare it might be, but I question the real value of the outcome of this.

Todd Sieling’s last blog post..Comics and Keynote: Testing UI Flow in Wireframes

Rare, and thus valuable! The most interesting information is the stuff that isn’t normally publicized.

I made my #unfollow suggestion in jest, but I believe the unfeeling robot monster logic of it is solid.

Ryan Cousineau’s last blog post..Hypercube post-mortem

Hah well I’m relieved it’s in jest, but does rare=valuable always pan out? I don’t do the proverbial ‘eating a sandwich’ tweets, but that wouldn’t make them valuable. Now, if I tweeted that I ate an extraordinary sandwich and where others could get said sandwich, it’s valuable, but because of the scarcity of good sandwich sources not because of how rarely people share them. I’m arguing semantics and talking sandwiches, which means it’s time for lunch.

You’re relieved? It’s still a good idea.

I oversimplified. Value is a function of supply and demand. I don’t tell you what my socks smell like (low supply!) and you don’t want to know (low demand!) so that is not valuable information.

However, you probably would find it valuable to find out which of your friends your best friend hated the most. See if they’ll tell you.

Ryan Cousineau’s last blog post..Hypercube post-mortem

I think that’s what I was getting at, is that value has more than one dimension to it (and possibly more than two). As for would I find it valuable to find out the friends hating friends thing, I’m not sure that’s a discussion I’d start, especially in the clear in a public channel like Twitter. I’m just not that down with anti-recommendations (or necessarily with recommendations) that don’t come from a context that makes them valuable or pertinent.

What would Marshall McLuhan have had to say about Twitter? If the medium is the message, Twitter is 20,000 miles wide and an inch deep. It spreads shallowness by its very nature.

Another McLuhan quote in the same vein: The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

Ian: McLuhan is mis-applied here. Brevity is the soul of wit. Twitter is a valuable constraint on those with verbal diarrhea (myself included).

Ryan Cousineau’s last blog post..Hypercube post-mortem