Jay Goldman

I’ve never been a believer in the so-called “Twitter etiquette” of following everyone who follows you. Sure you can do it to be polite, but you could also just walk up to the giant machine connected to the firehose and turn the Signal dial all the way over to the Noise end of the spectrum. As you’ll quickly discover, it’s impossible to keep up with more than about 150 people on Twitter and actually read every tweet (co-incidentally, also know as Dunbar’s Number: a measurement of the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”). As of right now, I’m following 617 people and I have 2,156 followers, which is pretty close to a 1:4 ratio (a pretty unbalanced asymmetric network).

That, of course, raises the question of how I choose who to follow. I generally get introduced to people from four sources:

1. I have Twitter send me new follow notifications. This quickly stops scaling and I find my inbox generally has about 30 notices in it that I need to read and catch up on. I also get a daily report from SocialToo.com, but I don’t find it helps me much more than Twitter’s individual notices and I tend to use it more for the Unfollows.
2. I use TweetDeck and always have one column open with my Replies (i.e.: any Tweet from the public stream that contains “@jaygoldman”). If you’re not using TweetDeck, do yourself a favour and go try it. It’s a little overwhelming at first — Steve Rubel refered to it as the “Web 2.0’s Bloomberg Terminal” which I thought was pretty apt — but if you’re serious about participating and being involved, you need a constant view of the world. I do my best to reply to people who ask me questions or respond to my tweets and will often check out their profile.
3. I use services like Mr. Tweet, which can be really helpful for turning up people you might like based on other people who are following them. I must be turning up in Mr. Tweet suggestion lists because I’m finding more and more that the most recent tweet from new followers is the notice that they’re checking out their Mr. Tweet report. This does tend to err on the side of “Twitter celebrities”, so don’t take it as your sole source (although they are working to keep the algorithm balanced).
4. Lastly, I look for @names of people I don’t know in the tweets from people I do know as a form of personal recommendation.

When I’m looking at a profile of someone I’m thinking of following, here’s what I’m looking for. I don’t hold firm to any one of these as the deciding factor, but they all play into whether I click “follow” or not.

• How many followers do they have? Twitter is very much a meritocracy, and it tends to be the case that people with lots of followers are adding lots of value. That isn’t always true, and it’s not a great heuristic in that it misses out on people who have recently joined and haven’t yet built their community. Since my view of their profile is a snapshot, they could be on their way from 2 followers to 2,000 and I wouldn’t know.
• What’s their friend to follower ratio? Maybe a better way to look at it is their Friend to Follower ratio. Many of the Twitter users I see approach a symmetric network (i.e.: a ratio of 1:1), and most of the ones who aren’t in balance are following more people than are following them (i.e.: 2x:x or even 10x:x). Users with more followers than friends (i.e.: x:2x) tend to be adding more value and therefore attract my attention.
• Are they still following me? That may sound like a tit-for-tat exchange, but there’s actually some logic behind it. If your aim is to build up as many followers as possible, you can game the system by following and then immediately unfollowing people. Everyone who has auto-follow (but not auto-unfollow) enabled will stay on your list, as will the people who see you in their Twitter new follower emails and like your profile. You win by keeping your signal to noise ratio down but still (artificially) getting credibility. New followers are almost always still following me, and I’ve followed a few who weren’t, so this one doesn’t get as much weight in the overall decision.
• What’s their bio? Don’t underestimate the importance of those 160 characters! Sometimes I follow people just based on what they chose to say they do, and sometimes I immediately close the tab and leave. Mine says “Technologist, designer, speaker, O’Reilly and HBR author, generally swell guy.”, which is the same tagline from my blog with the addition of O’Reilly and HBR as qualifications. I’m much more likely to follow you if your bio says you have an amazing job or you deserve merit based on your past experiences than I am if it says you like cats and underwater basket weaving (not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially if you take the cats under water with you). I tend to strongly stay away from people whose profile is all about “helping other people to make money on the Internet!!!!!”, who specialize in “SEO and Interweb Marketing”, or who are professional life and business coaches. No offence to any of them and I’m sure they’re lovely people, but that’s not my cup of tea.
  
• Do they have a website? Don’t use this as a hard and fast rule as there are many interesting people who don’t have a site. That said, if you’re a blogger and there’s somewhere I can go to see what you sound like when you’re not speaking in sound bites, definitely put it in. I love, for example, that @pistachio has created a page on her blog called “Who is Pistachio” to send people to. I used to have the main page of my blog listed but then I made a fancy Twitter background with the URL in it, so now I point people to my more informative About page.
  
• Are they part of the conversation? I do a quick scan down their list of tweets to see how many are replies vs. status updates. People who just update their status might be following the letter but not spirit of Twitter (”What are you doing?” vs. “What are you thinking?”), but they’re basically keeping a cheese sandwich micro-blog. For those not familiar with the term it comes from a 2002 Wired article in which Dave Linabury is quoted as saying:
  

  “One of the things I don’t like is the blog where someone says something like, ‘Today I had a cheese sandwich.’ That’s the kind of thing you see in most of these blogs. You know, fascinating. I don’t give a flying … whatever what you ate. Don’t tell me you have a flat tire. And if this is how boring their writing is, I can’t imagine how boring they must be to talk to in general.”

  A little more extreme than I might put it, but basically accurate. I make exceptions here for people whose cheese sandwiches I actually care about (e.g.: friends, family, my wife), but this is a pretty firm rule if you’re not in one of them.

• Are their tweets interesting? It may seem funny that this is last on the list, but there’s a good reason for it. This step takes the longest since there’s a lot more text to read, so I tend to do it last in case anything above answers the question first. If you’re a Firefox user (and you really should be), I highly recommend the Power Twitter add-on that gives you some really useful features whenever you’re looking at a profile page on the Twitter site. High-level features include search, search scoped to a specific user, status history peeking on mouseover (great for browsing follower lists), Facebook status updates (though you can use the Twitter Facebook app for this), inline YouTube, Flickr, and TwitPic videos and photos, and URL expansion and translation to page titles. The last two are the most useful here as they save you from having to click on a bunch of shortened URLs (from Twurl, TinyURL, IsGd, etc.) by showing you the title of the linked page, and from having to click through to lots of YouTube links (or being rickrolled).

I haven’t calculated any kind of weighted algorithm that could do this automatically (though I certainly encourage you to do so and post it in the comments and then build me a tool to do this automatically while I sip mojitos in the shade), but I do stick to this list pretty closely. I’m curious to know how this compares to other people’s lists: what makes you follow someone?

And now, since you haven’t built me my Twitter Follow Diagnoser 2000 yet, please excuse me while I go empty my inbox.