My do’s and do not’s on Twitter (1)

They are out there the ‘Follow please ===> @’ or '#FF'  tweets, particularly on #followfriday. In fact, on Fridays I sometimes get the feeling that half of my timeline is filled with them.

I find them of very limited use if they are tweeted out with the expectation that the number of followers grows. The impact of these tweets is practically nil in my experience.

Several times I checked up on it, when giving a solo shout-out to somebody I wanted to support. I logged into their profile before tweeting the shoutout, and watched their follower count. After ten minutes one, maybe two of my followers had followed them.

Now, you might say that’s because my influence on Twitter sucks…… hmmmm

Communication on twitter is mostly of an indirect nature. More than anything else these ‘Follow please ===> @’ are coded communication. They translate to ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing’ or ‘Cool stuff you tweet’ or simply ‘I’m with you on this’.

For a long time I included everybody who gave me a shoutout in MY shoutouts, basically out of courtesy. But that’s become impractical because of the sheer number of users who include me nowadays in their shoutouts. 

I had to make a choice, and now I’m including those who are RT’ ing me or are making a direct, pertinent comment on my tweets.

(New to this? An RT (re-tweet) is when somebody copies my tweet and put’s RT @Georg_Grey in front or at the end of it. People do that when they particularly like a tweet as in, for example: RT @Georg_Grey: If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t more people happy?) . 

To sum up, shoutouts are useless when implemented as a tool to grow the follower base. They are, however, like RT’s, a great tool of indirect communication.