I have something to admit; I’m still struggling with Twitter. I think it’s an amazing marketing platform (more specifically an announcement platform) and brand monitoring option but using twitter to engage in ‘conversation’ with more than a dozen people is something I can’t get my head around. To me it’s like simultaneously watching lots of TV shows; it ends up being just a lot of noise.
I often hear people talk about how many followers they have and it seems bigger is better. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life trying to convince myself that size doesn’t matter but I digress. If you ‘follow’ (a twitter term synonymous with ‘to listen to’) more than 100 people how you can have any meaningful conversation?
When I ask this question the ‘twits’ talk about lists. They explain that you can group and sort people into lists thereby allowing you to follow the most important people and, I assume, ignore the rest? If that is the case what’s the point of following them in the first place? It’s like telling someone “It’s great meeting you, let’s be friends! Just don’t ever talk to me because I don’t actually have any interest in what you have to say.”
Some of my best friends in real estate, including thought leaders and top performing agents, have more than 10,000 followers. Because of “reciprocal following” they are probably following nearly all those people back. Reciprocal following is the biggest joke of it all; it’s the twitter equivalent of saying “Thank you for following me! Because you want to hear what I have to say I want to hear what you have to say too!”
The truth is that anyone following 10,000 people is ignoring 9,900 of them.
The only way for someone to actually truly follow (aka listen) to hundreds of people is to sit at their computer all day watching the stream of comments (aka tweets). Please tell me people aren’t doing that. In fact (and more importantly) please admit, just for once, that following more than 100 people is more about bragging rights and ego than practical conversation?
There are multiple programs and Websites and applications that help you manage all of this tweeting noise with Tweetdeck being the most popular. The product was recently updated and the following video details some of the enhancements. It still doesn’t solve my problem though, hopefully it will for you:
