I’ve seen this strategy pushed all the time and tried it myself on Twitter. I didn’t just do automatic follow-backs either; I regularly retweeted, shared cool content, joined in conversations, etc. This took a fair amount of time to do properly (sifting through all the material to find the articles I thought merited retweets, for example), and as the number of people I followed grew, my stream became so noisy I began to be unable to find quality content or the people I actually wanted to talk to.
I know, I know, Tweetdeck. But all Tweetdeck does is allow you to divide people into lists, and show those lists in different columns. It’s still the same amount of information to read. And most people don’t have time to read that much information. I began to realize that, in fact, most people weren’t reading the information I was sharing. The whole “I’ll follow you if you follow me” game was resulting in a torrent of what I like to call “Fake Follows:” follows in which neither person actually reads anything the other person is sharing, instead using lists and circles to avoid each other, while boosting up Follower count.
So when I got the opportunity to start over again on Google+, I decided to try something different. I don’t feel obligated to circle someone when they’ve circled me. A revolutionary thought! Instead, if I have the time, I go look at the person’s posts that are visible to me, and I decide whether or not to add the person to my circles based on how interesting she is to me. And if someone starts posting up a storm about topics that make me feel stressed or bored, I remove them from my circles. (For instance, anyone who starts complaining all the time about Google+ while not being constructive or actually saying much of anything? Kaput. Life is seriously too short.) Meanwhile, if people who are reading me comment intelligently about something I’m sharing, I’m very likely to check them out again and see if their posts have become more interesting, giving them another chance to be added to my circles.
What I am left with is a much higher quality stream than I would otherwise have, without the charade that I’m following people who I never read. I circle people who I think are interesting without worrying about whether they’ll find me interesting in return. And I curate the “Amy feed” knowing that if anybody finds it extremely dull, they can always remove me from circles, which means I don’t have to censor myself from sharing on a variety of topics.
I don’t think Fake Following is effective at marketing or spreading the word about your book or getting people to spend money. What I think is truly effective is following people who give you value: with whom you can engage on a personal level, or who feed your artistic spirit (I follow some great photographers for this reason), or who give you interesting food for thought. These are the people who will enrich your life, and if you begin to develop a relationship or even a friendship with them, these are the people who will support you in your endeavors. You can’t fake this support; it must be earned.
So for those of you on Google+, I encourage you to share some posts publicly, so that other users can tell if they might enjoy adding you to their circles. And for those of you on Google+ or Twitter, I encourage you to choose authenticity over the Fake Follow, to follow people because you are truly interested in them, not just to add to your numbers.
How about you? How do you decide who to follow on social media? Are you interested in following people you don’t know personally?
The Practical Free Spirit 
Isn’t it fascinating that something that didn’t even exist a few years ago has become so important? If I could expose my grandparents to this, their heads would explode.
I know! I remember when I got my first email account and it was such a big deal that I could keep in touch with high school friends without having to write them physical letters. This quickly turned into me not keeping in touch with anybody who didn’t have an email address….
Very good post, Amy 🙂
Thank you, Alexander!
This is such an astute post and something I’ve noticed too. Like Twitter, for example–I started up there, followed people who looked interesting, got fake followed by them, built up a big FF circle, spent a lot of time posting and replying including linking back to specific blog entries, but then when I looked at my referrer log, the number of people who actually clicked on my blog links from Twitter was completely disproportionate to the amount of time I was spending on there. It was a huge waste of time as far as generating actual traffic.
What I’ve found most effective is simply following and commenting on other blogs I find interesting. Then you can build that reciprocal relationship with the blogger because it’s a MEANINGFUL interaction. And even in blogging stats, it’s not about how many people hit your site once, it’s how many people keep coming back. Twitter may generate that single hit, but at least for me, it wasn’t building lasting relationships and readers. As an added bonus, I have also gotten readers who clicked on my comments on other people’s blogs because they liked what I said in that comment, and then decided to stick around my blog, so it isn’t just reciprocal with the blogger on whose blog I’m commenting.
The best thing I really got from Twitter was that using hashtags allowed me to find other Disney and Disneyland blogs–I followed blog addresses off of people’s profiles, then checked out their blogs, and the ones I liked I continue to follow. Twitter was definitely a convenient way to find blogs but I got very little out of the interaction on that site.
Excellent points about what works for blogging. I’ve found the same thing, that it is the community building that matters. And engagement on other blogs seems a lot more effective for building readership than many other means.
Also I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who generated very little traffic from Twitter. It’s dropped to almost nil now that I mostly use the site to chat…but I’m enjoying myself a lot more now!
I actually have a lot of trouble finding blogs. I can find a million and one writer blogs, but the minute I decide I want to read a historian blog or a psychology blog, I have no idea where to look. I did at least find a few economist blog gems though. 🙂
I am someone who is prone to the “guilt follow” – someone like my ex, with whom I really don’t desire contact but is still good friends with mutual friends, adds me on G+. I add him to my acquaintance circle and move on with my life. Right now, acquaintance is my dumping ground for not-really-reciprocal follows. I have to admit, there’s a part of me that wants to keep tabs (just because I don’t want to *talk* to him doesn’t mean I don’t ever want to know what’s up in his life or that I hope he’s doing well for himself), and to that end putting him in my acquaintance circle works for me.
Kind of.
What I would really really love is a feature to set a default stream. Then I could said my friend stream to default so I don’t miss the stuff I really care about, but I also don’t have to worry about being either inundated or surprised by content from other, less-prioritized circles.
On the other hand, if I get circled by folks I don’t even know a little, I’ll still check their posts once in awhile, but they don’t get circled by default. So that’s something, I guess 🙂
It is something! Definitely!
The guilt follow, yes. Reminds me of Facebook, when you get those awkward requests until you become paranoid of making requests to anyone else. Ugh.
This is the policy I’ve always followed (except on FB, where was playing games).
Oh yeah, I still have a few random Facebook friends from back during my brief gaming stint. Now that I think about it, the incentives of those games were a rather bizarre match for the mainstream use of Facebook to stay in touch with people you already know.
Google+ & Twitter seem to be classic cases of the 80/20 rule; 80% of the stuff I actually wanted to read was coming from 20% of the people. So I pared down. And yeah, I think your post is bang on.
Paring down can be so liberating! Suddenly you have more time and you can actually engage meaningfully with the people that are left. Until the inevitable build-up happens again, anyway. 🙂
I learned to use the ignore button a lot of facebook. And that one was kind of hard because in order for people to see what you were doing, you had to friend them. I do like how Google+ is set up, letting people follow you.
Yes, Facebook is another thing altogether. My new project is to try to remember who is cross-posting content among sites so I can ignore them on Facebook, therefore not having to read the same content three times.
On Twitter, I don’t auto-follow, but I’ll usually check mutual “acquaintances” and a person’s tweets and then make a decision on whether or not to follow. I try to keep my feed interesting, informative, and/or entertaining– I don’t just follow people for the sake of following them, or to make us both of feel good about having fake-followed each other. Twitter’s been a great networking tool for me, but I also want that networking to be genuine, and to be able to follow up on it if we ever meet in person– at WorldCon last week, for example, I recognized and happily met many people I’ve followed on Twitter for a while… yourself included. =)
Honestly, I’ve done almost nothing with Google Plus… not because I think it’s a bad tool, but because I already have Facebook and Twitter, and the thought of trying to build up and maintain a third social network does not exactly fill me with joy. But if anyone has any software to recommend with which I could interact with all three through the same interface (last I checked, Tweetdeck doesn’t support Google+), I’d like to hear it.
It’s really great to meet people in person after following them, isn’t it? I’m always so interested to see how they compare with the person in my head.
I’m afraid I’m not the person to ask about the platform thingie, as I do it all the old fashioned way (and perhaps as a result, am spending less and less time on Facebook, and strangely, more time on Twitter than previously). I’m sure if there isn’t software already there will be soon, though.
G+ allows you to segment on who you are publishing to, not just reading. So auto-following makes a lot of sense if you have two vastly different careers or interests (for example, writing and your day job).
Ha! We crossposted, as I just suggested something similar over on G+ about it being different if I had a day job. So yes, in the case of trying to manage to whom you publish what, auto-following does make a lot of sense. I’m hoping there may be different tools for that down the line though, so I don’t have to manage publishing circles as well as reading circles. We’ll see…
In all honesty, NEITHER tactic is going to “work.” Fake following is of course not useful for the reasons so well outlined in the article and the comments. BUT, participating in meaningful engagement (even if your blog/product/whatever starts making large amounts of money) will come down to nothing more than a $2/hr endeavor AT BEST. You’re better off making “meaningful engagement” as a cashier at McDonald’s.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I said, “What I think is truly effective is following people who give you value: with whom you can engage on a personal level, or who feed your artistic spirit (I follow some great photographers for this reason), or who give you interesting food for thought. These are the people who will enrich your life, and if you begin to develop a relationship or even a friendship with them, these are the people who will support you in your endeavors.”
I assume that your work in quotes refers to marketing. What I’m talking about above isn’t marketing, at least not in any traditional sense. It is engagement with a community, and for me, it has worked pretty well. I’m not doing it to make money, so perhaps that is the point of confusion.
When I reached about 700, I stopped checking things on my follower/following list regularly. Once in a while, I would check my Twitter to see what kinds of tweets they post. If it seems human, I add that person. If it’s not, then I don’t.
It’s a way to get to know people I don’t know. Others I’ve removed simply because their tweets annoyed me (when it feels like a spam).
I agree that following spam is rarely (if ever) a happy thing.