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03 04 2009

To follow or not to follow, that is the question

Posted by: mysticventures in networking, Social Media, Twitter

My apologies to Shakespeare for abusing one of the most quoted and quotable quotes of all time.  But it is so apropos to deciding who to follow online through a variety social media services.  If we aren’t careful we are bombarded with so much information that we can end up missing the best and most important nuggets of information. 

Those bits of information, links, photos, opinion, news are as valuable as gold nuggets in the currency of shared knowledge.  So we need a mechanism like the gold miners use to seperate the gold from the gravel, or in our case the gold from the noise.  That’s why it’s so important to choose who you follow carefully.  Choose those that provide a high yield of gold per post based on what our focus and intrests are.

In my own experience with setting up the multiple tweeter accounts for instance has improved my yield.  A number of people have chosen to follow me @mysticventures, for instance, that don’t fit my ideal of high yield contributers to that twitter account.  But looking at their twitter accounts I most often see that they have a high yield of gold that fit into one of my other twitter accounts. So I follow them from that account.  The net affect is that I have improved the experience for everyone by mantaining my focus. I get a high yield of gold from those that I follow and I’m able to provide a high yield to those that choose to follow me.

Ultimately isn’t that the essence of of networking? To recieve and provide the highest yield for your network as possible.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under networking, Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Bud

    Check out TweetDeck. I was hesitant to follow a bunch of people and the news tweets get too much after awhile. However TweetDeck lets you organize the Tweeters you follow however you want. Create a column for news, for friends, for celebs, etc. Then I started playing this game called playspymaster.com. In order to get stronger in the game you need to have more followers on Twitter. In order to get more followers you have to go follow more people. So I follow a bunch of people I don't care about reading anything they say. So I use TweetDeck on my computer and iphone to just read the people i actually am interested in following. I'm sure this isn't the solution for everyone. However, TweetDeck is a very handy free app that has many more cool features for utilizing Twitter efficiently than what I've already mentioned.

  • mysticventures

    I tried out TweetDeck it's ok for a desktop solution. I prefer HootSuite as a web application, because I spend more of my time with the browser than with the desktop applications.

    I want people to follow me who are interested in what I post about. I only follow people that post on topics that I'm interested in. That's why I have multiple accounts. I think this whole idea of quantity over quality is the same thing we've gone through with creating opt in email lists and web traffic. The idea is to attract the best targeted audience, not necessarily the largest.

    Thanks for the comment.

  • http://budque.com budque

    Check out TweetDeck. I was hesitant to follow a bunch of people and the news tweets get too much after awhile. However TweetDeck lets you organize the Tweeters you follow however you want. Create a column for news, for friends, for celebs, etc. Then I started playing this game called playspymaster.com. In order to get stronger in the game you need to have more followers on Twitter. In order to get more followers you have to go follow more people. So I follow a bunch of people I don't care about reading anything they say. So I use TweetDeck on my computer and iphone to just read the people i actually am interested in following. I'm sure this isn't the solution for everyone. However, TweetDeck is a very handy free app that has many more cool features for utilizing Twitter efficiently than what I've already mentioned.

  • mysticventures

    I tried out TweetDeck it's ok for a desktop solution. I prefer HootSuite as a web application, because I spend more of my time with the browser than with the desktop applications.

    I want people to follow me who are interested in what I post about. I only follow people that post on topics that I'm interested in. That's why I have multiple accounts. I think this whole idea of quantity over quality is the same thing we've gone through with creating opt in email lists and web traffic. The idea is to attract the best targeted audience, not necessarily the largest.

    Thanks for the comment.