WeFollow a Waste?

It’s a race for the top. And what a race it is on Twitter. Let me give you some background to this.

A hashtag is a # symbol that is used to identify content about a specific topic. So if I wrote a #gardening post – people who were searching on #gardening, would find it. Or #sailing, or #knitting or #anything. It’s a way to search and find information on Twitter that we all use.

There’s another service that’s a Twitter resource called WeFollow (wefollow.com) You go to this site- identify yourself as #gardener and all other folks who identified themselves as gardeners can find you. You can share in the gardening world. It’s pretty simple and an interesting way to find new gardening friends.

Or it was.

Like everything else, spammers or those involved in “social media” are taking over. I can see it in the gardening world right now.

Here’s the deal.

Wefollow also lists and ranks twitterers by the number of people following them. So if you go to the wefollow site and search on gardening. We all pop up ranked by the number of followers we have.

The top person ranking for gardening has 22,277 followers as of July 23 and added 167 of them in the last day or so. Number 3 has 15205 and added 242 followers in the last few days. You can go down the ranks of this site at http://wefollow.com/twitter/gardening to see the relative ranking of people and see how many people they’re adding to “get to the top” of the list.

Do you know how hard you have to work to add that many people unless you’re automating the process. And if you’re automating it – what’s the point? To get a bunch of people who “follow” you but don’t read you or pay attention to you? What’s the point of that?

But you can rank pretty highly if that’s some kind of prize.

Me? I rank about 90 give or take but I’m not in it for the numbers. Many (if not most) of my followers in the past few weeks are spammers, affiliate marketers and porn sites (why they pick on me is beyond my understanding) and I don’t follow back but if surely looks like I’m growing nicely. LOL! And I have just over 1000 followers which makes me a long, long way from the top of that pile.

So if your objective is to get to the top of the pile in wefollow, then you need to use some automation to do it. And clearly it hasn’t much value if the people are gaming the system merely to rank highly on that score.

Here’s the dirty little secret we don’t tell you. We all use software now (I use seesmic) to filter our tweets. You have to be interesting for me to follow you and you have to be really interesting for me to filter you into the two streams of info I read regularly. If you’re boring, post a gazillion tweets a day, try to sell me an affiliate marketing program, never enter an @ conversation, try to convince me to use an automated submission system, you go into the general stream never to be read again or if you’re obnoxious about it, I unfollow you. And everybody does the same thing.

So here’s the deal. You get 100 people who follow you – and read you – and you’re good. You get 20,000 people to follow you and they all filter you out – what’s the point?

It’s about quality people – not about quantity.

And that’s why I won’t ever make the top 50 – never mind the top 10. I’m just not that committed to working that hard to get those numbers. I’d rather try to do it the old fashioned way – by providing some sense of interesting information and relationships.