Musing about Twitter

I've been on Twitter for a few months now, and am still trying to explore and understand all of its potential uses. Recently, people to whom I have no connection have started to follow me. This set me to thinking and wondering:

1. I'm new to this phenomenon of having businesspeople I don't know start following me on Twitter.


2. It's weird. Perhaps I should be happy and honored, because ostensibly it means that more people are reading what I have to say, that they like what I have to say, and that they might someday be interested in hiring me.


3. But I wonder if they are just following me because they hope that I will follow them back.


4. How did they find me, anyway?


5. Is this what most companies are using Twitter for? Following others just to get them to follow back? Cialdini's old "reciprocity" principle?


6. I wonder if there is solid data yet on how and why companies are using Twitter?


7. Maybe it's just the sleazy, value-less ones who are doing this "serial following." Is it akin to spamming and pop-ups?


8. A couple of the strangers who just started following me seem to subscribe to services like www.TweepMe.com ("Get 4,000 Twitter followers for $19.95"); www.GetMeFollowers.com (Register; follow/refer users; get points; get more followers); www.TopFollowed.com ("reciprocal following"), etc.


9. Why? Reciprocal following makes sense, if it's organic. But why manufacture it? Why follow/be followed by people you don't care about? Do you really want quantity instead of quality?


10. Are there people out there whose goal is to get thousands of followers on Twitter, simply for the sake of being able to say they have thousands of followers on Twitter?


11. Why?


12. Are they viewing Twitter as a new [business] toy? Whoever has the most followers wins?


13. Is it based on the human desire to be heard?


14. Is it because they're expecting those followers to turn into new customers?


15. Don't they believe that if they truly have a great product or service, that they will gain loyal fans anyway? And those loyal fans will then want to follow them on Twitter? Not the other way around?


16. There's another stranger following me on Twitter, who tweets 20 times a day, posting links to other peoples' online articles. I wonder why.


17. Most of these people who seem to be "serial followers" (aka they try to follow as many people as they can, in order to get as many followers as they can), may have numbers of "following" and "followers" in the hundreds or thousands, but they have more they are "following" than they have "followers."


18. It seems to me that a well-known, successful company who is known to be excellent and has lots of loyal customers, will have a lot more followers than people they are following. As in 100:1 or 1000:1. Or maybe they don't follow anybody at all, but all of their customers/fans follow them.


19. That would be my measure of success for Twitter: is your Followers/Following ratio greater than 1?


20. If you're following more than you are being followed, it tells me that you don't have much of value to say. And why are you following so many people anyway? Are there really that many people whose words are meaningful enough that they are worth your time to follow them? I haven't found quite so many sources of excellence whom I want to learn from and emulate.


21. But perhaps I'm on Twitter for a different reason than these people are.


22. As for the people I don't know who are following me on Twitter, it would please me more to see them follow my blog instead.


23. If they follow my blog, it tells me that they like what I have to say.


24. If they like what I have to say, maybe we can have a conversation. Maybe they'll want to do business with me in the future.

But maybe I just don't "get" Twitter yet. Maybe I should read all those hundreds of articles on Twitter and why companies must use it.