TechWag

The latest debate to hit the social networking scene is cleaning out everyone you are following in twitter and cutting it down to a core group. In the longer run this is good because you cut down on the noise level, and you can focus more on what matters to you. The problem is that we spent so long auto following people that we really have no idea who we are following, and what they are doing with that information.

If you look at the number of people who follow me on Twitter, it goes like this.

40% of all twitter followers sent in the last 30 days had their account closed down due to spam or for some other reason; their account had been shut down by twitter before I even got there.

30% of all twitter followers sent in the last 30 days have 10 or less comments, but huge followings and were also huge followers. With systems like tweet tornado it is easy to make a loop back retweet auto follow loop back that makes you look more important than you really are. The system amplifies the noise, and if you auto follow, that noise follows your chain of friends which can cause a loss of reputation if suddenly your auto followed friends start selling porn, which gets auto retweeted up and down your collection of followers.

10% of folks were people who were busy flogging dubious services, or while interesting ended up not being followed by me for one reason or another. Anyone who had the words “get rich quick” or “it is easy to use social networking” falls into this category.

20% were people I actually ended up following because what I thought they had to say was interesting, or something else made me curious about them, enough that I would spend time reading their web site, and making a quality/value judgment.

I know my numbers on Twitter do not follow this trending line, but with 40% of people who followed me vaporizing before I even get there, the numbers are going to be skewed in the total number of followed and followers. That is a function of twitter, and how they work their system or make decisions about people who are abusing their system.

The idea behind social networking is not so much quantity but a focus on quality, which is great when Loic and Robert are debating the relative merits of who to follow and then invite the world in on that conversation. I still think that when you choose to auto follow, or blindly follow everyone who is following you, you end up playing Russian roulette with your account. You never know who is following you and you should be making some decisions here, not clogging your own friend network with people who are more interested in saying “Robert Scoble follows me, why don’t you?”

Robert Scoble shows up in marketing material to me via e-mail more times than he is probably aware of.

Loic though figured this one out, and cleaned out the back ground noise from his life, and when you have a leader do something, and then many people will follow. In this case Loic did many people a favor because we are still figuring out what is and what is not appropriate when it comes to social media. Usually an unfollow has consequences for people that go well beyond the social networks that they participate in.

This is a conversation that we need to have, one that we have been having slowly over the last year with some unexpected results. The good part is that we are realizing that social networking carries with it great potential to do good, but also has its down side. If you use automated software to auto follow everyone who follows you, then you get exposed to the down side much quicker than if you manually make a qualitative decision about to follow or not to follow. Loic and Robert did us a favor here by showing us that we can do the same thing, chose to clear out the junk followers, and move on to having conversations with people that provide value to those conversations.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HOW TO: Connect With the FriendFeed Community (mashable.com)
• We Are All Recognized. Be Remembered. (kylelacy.com)
• Does the number of followers really matter (techwag.com)
• Six Degrees of Robert Scoble (coldacid.net)