STL Social Media Guy

First, a hearty hello after about a weeklong hiatus, thanks in part to the visit from my parents. It was great to see Dave and Ro for several days. And it would have been flat rude to sit around blogging while they were visiting. I’ll tell’em you said hi.

Second, during my hiatus, I noted Jack Lail’s recent post about the Twitter account “RU4Real” and the thousands of people it is following — as an experiment to see how many people pay attention to what they follow. (As an aside, that account is now following 5,911 people and has 163 followers.)

After about a year of Twitter membership (four months of which was trying to figure out what it was all about), I now have 122 followers — and I’m following 105.

Obviously, the more people you follow and the more people who follow you, the more often you get followed. What I’m finding, however, is that I’m getting followed more and more often by Twit-spammers, which means I’m spending more time investigating the people who follow me. And, it seems to me, I’m getting followed by more people who are trying to sell something — real estate, programming services, commodities, sex. Yes, I think I have a couple of online porn followers. I have sad news for them…

Frankly, it makes me like Twitter a little bit less.

So, I get an e-mail saying so-and-so is following me. So-and-so is following 10,000 people and has 36 followers. Not interested. Or its tweets are almost exclusively @replies. Not interested. Or the user name is something like “buywindows.” Are you serious? You can’t even be subtle about hawking your crap?

No. Give me someone who has an interesting blog link from their profile page. Or throws in some funny lines about what’s going on outside the window. Or works, lives and plays in my area code. Or my industry.

I haven’t really looked yet, but if there’s a great application out there for more easily managing your followers, I’m all ears. Plodding through the followers list on Twitter is tedious. The Twitter wiki has a category for ideas about how to deal with friends and followers more efficiently.

And don’t get me wrong: I love the people who use the tool in the spirit in which it is intended. I’ve found some really interesting information and enjoyed the dialog. But I don’t want to buy your windows.

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