Follow back, y’all
Follow-spam: when someone follows you on a social network, without regard for the value of your content, in hopes that you will view their content (bringing them value), or in hopes that you follow back robotically, increasing their page rank and/or popularity.
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If you follow me on:
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- Twitter: I will check your following / follower ratio. If the ratio is less than, or close enough to one, then I’ll likely follow you back. (I reserve the right to un-follow if you are overly talkative!)
- Tumblr: I will check your site, if you don’t declare who you are following, I won’t follow you. If you declare who you are following, and it is off the charts in terms of what I feel you could possibly read & enjoy, I won’t follow you. (Again, I reserve the right to un-follow if your content isn’t something I’ll continue to enjoy)
Aaronwhite has a reasonable approach to dealing with follower-spam. One quibble on the tumblr criteria he uses: a lot of people use the default themes and can’t show a tumbleroll.
The nice thing about tumblr is that you can follow a lot of people without being totally overwhelmed. With filtering on the dashboard you can skim people you follow for interesting quotes, new music, links, photos, etc. So for us less famous people having a following/follower ratio much greater than one isn’t necessarily a sign of follower-spam, just diverse interests and possibly a late start.
Twitter’s a place where I do think it makes sense to follow a lot of people, but I don’t understand how folks can meaningfully follow 10K+ people. It would all just be noise to me. To me a few hundred would be a lot. The main reasons for follower-spam are either ego-cast or broadcast. That is, using twitter to broadcast information rather than to have a conversation. In the broadcast situation having a large number of followers is clearly the goal and it’s likely that a following/follower ratio close to 1 (or even greater than) is reasonable, as long as the followers find the information worthwhile. I have an experiment going on twitter now that falls into the broadcast category, although conversation is appreciated it has been minimal. Ego-cast is where someone just wants a large following to say, ‘hey look at me’. I think the ego-cast is the situation Aaron is trying to avoid.
