Twitter Populated By Drones And Fakes?

Editor’s Note: This is the first post in a series of com­men­tary on the con­cept of Twit­ter aut­o­fol­low. After read­ing this post, I rec­om­mend you read the sec­ond one here. Thanks! – Michel Fortin

Twit­ter is a fan­tas­tic mar­ket­ing tool. I love it and I encour­age every­one to get on it. But I do have a warn­ing, because the way some peo­ple use it today is not only wrong, but it can also become poten­tially dan­ger­ous to its survival.

Twit­ter is micro-​​blogging, i.e., blog­ging in a shorter for­mat. It lim­its the posts to 140 char­ac­ters. The rea­son for the limit is, when Twit­ter was first intro­duced it was intended to be used for text-​​messaging (SMS) between mobile phones.

The SMS pro­to­col, along with most phones, limit their mes­sages to 160 char­ac­ters. (Twit­ter reserves the first 20 for usernames.)

I love Twit­ter because, as a copy­writer, it’s also a great tool to force you to be pithy, test head­lines and sub­ject lines, and cre­ate a per­sona around which you build your brand.

How­ever, there’s one thing that seri­ously irks me and my wife, Sylvie Fortin, to no end. That one thing is in the process of destroy­ing one of the best tools to come on the Inter­net since the inven­tion of email. And that’s rec­i­p­ro­cal fol­low­ing.

First, I don’t use Twit­ter for telling my fol­low­ers every bit of minu­tia of my day. I think that’s ridicu­lous and absurd.

If I were a celebrity, sure. Fans love to hear about the daily activ­i­ties of their favorite stars. We live in a voyeuris­tic soci­ety. That’s why real­ity TV shows have exploded, and the whole con­cept of social media along with it.

Auto-​​following is where you auto­mat­i­cally fol­low some­one who fol­lows you. There are many ben­e­fits to rec­i­p­ro­cal fol­low­ing, such as giv­ing your fol­low­ers the abil­ity to send you a pri­vate, direct message.

But to me, auto-​​following is, at its core, no dif­fer­ent than post­ing your web­site URL willy-​​nilly to a bunch of free-​​for-​​all link farms, which was wildly pop­u­lar at the early onset of the Inter­net. And we all know how that turned out to be as a mar­ket­ing tac­tic.

In fact, FFA links only really ben­e­fited the owner of the link farm, because no one came to their web­site with the intent to read or click on those bazil­lion links. They only came to post their own link. And the FFA owner would there­fore be able to build a list they can eas­ily email to.

(Sounds famil­iar?)

I use Twit­ter for busi­ness — not for mar­ket­ing or sell­ing per se, but to share prob­a­bly the most impor­tant aspect in mar­ket­ing, social media, and the Inter­net in gen­eral (in fact, it’s the rea­son the Inter­net exists in the first place).

And that is (hold on tight, here it comes)…

… Infor­ma­tion!

(Crazy, huh?)

Yes, I love to “tweet” about web­sites I’ve vis­ited, which may be of inter­est to my fol­low­ers. I love to post quick tips and links to arti­cles I’ve stum­bled across that I find fas­ci­nat­ing or inter­est­ing. And I love to blog about prod­ucts, soft­ware, and pro­grams I’ve used or dis­cov­ered, which I believe my fol­low­ers would cer­tainly appre­ci­ate know­ing about.

And yes, I do insert from time to time an affil­i­ate link or two. But I wouldn’t post it if I didn’t think it would be of ben­e­fit to my fol­low­ers. My goal is not to make money with micro-​​blogging, or even blog­ging in gen­eral. It’s a byproduct.

But in terms of auto-​​following, I’ve always been against it. And yes­ter­day, I felt vin­di­cated, because I came across this remark­able short video from Seth Godin, who arguably is one of the lead­ing experts on marketing.

In it, Seth addresses the entire “social media for busi­ness” in a sim­ple state­ment. In fact, he did it in less than two min­utes. Basi­cally, he said that busi­ness is built on rela­tion­ships, not on how many fol­low­ers you have.

Seth calls it “fake net­work­ing” as opposed to real net­work­ing. What mat­ters is real rela­tion­ships, the rela­tion­ships you cre­ate, cul­ti­vate, and care about. Not num­bers on a Twit­ter account that only boast how pop­u­lar you are — or try to appear to be.

I believe most peo­ple use auto-​​follow in an attempt to inflate their num­bers, either for pure ego­tis­ti­cal rea­sons, or at most, for spam­ming their followers.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a case in point.

Auto-​​follow is often enabled through var­i­ous third-​​party soft­ware. But Twit­ter once had this fea­ture — some users still have it to this day. Well, just yes­ter­day Techcrunch reported a bit of news in which Twit­ter itself will aban­don the whole auto-​​follow process. And per­son­ally, I think it’s about freakin’ time.

Twitter’s CEO said it beau­ti­fully: “We’re going to dis­con­tinue aut­o­fol­low because this behav­ior sends the wrong mes­sage. Namely, it is unlikely that any­one can actu­ally read tweets from thou­sands of accounts which makes this activ­ity disingenuous.”

When I sent this link to my friend Armand Morin via a dis­cus­sion we were hav­ing within our mas­ter­mind coach­ing group, his reply was noth­ing short of bril­liant. He said…

I totally agree.

I think that is my biggest prob­lem with Social Media Marketing.

Peo­ple are fool­ing them­selves think­ing their num­bers of fol­low­ers or friends is an indi­ca­tion of their poten­tial income generation.

Why would this work?

Most peo­ple are fol­low­ing or becom­ing friends with strangers for two reasons.

1.) They want to build their own “LIST”

2.) They are fol­low­ing these peo­ple with the false illu­sion that they are going to be their “friend” and get FREE mar­ket­ing infor­ma­tion. Which they don’t real­ize is the per­son they are fol­low­ing is only inter­ested in OPTION #1 I listed above.

So are they really on your list want­ing to be mar­keted to?

The answer is obvi­ously no.

Now, I’ve dis­agreed with my friend Ed Dale in the past. But recently, Ed posted a video on the Twit­ter auto-​​follow non­sense, and this time I must whole­heart­edly agree with him.

In fact, just a cou­ple of months ago my wife and I were engaged in a fierce, con­tro­ver­sial debate online about the non­sen­si­cal nature of the whole auto-​​follow process. I want to share with you some of the high­lights from that debate here.

I can­not paste what oth­ers have said for copy­right rea­sons. But let me paste some of my tweets below. Most are from Twit­ter, but some are from Face­book since my tweets are simul­ta­ne­ously posted to my Face­book “wall,” which often gen­er­ate inde­pen­dent con­ver­sa­tions and addi­tional comments.

Under­stand­ably, some tweets are parts of con­ver­sa­tions. So to help you under­stand the con­text, each group of tweets are pre­ceded by a side­note to explain the his­tory behind it and give you some back­ground information.

SIDENOTE: The tweet that started it all…

• Auto-​​follow? Not me. My phi­los­o­phy is, I fol­low those who reply to @michelfortin as to engage me. It’s like say­ing “Hi!”
• What’s your fol­los­o­phy?* Auto-​​follow? Fol­low those who reply to you? Fol­low only follow-​​worthy? Fol­low “x” followers?

*By the way, “fol­los­o­phy” was coined by Har­ris Fell­man, not me.

SIDENOTE: Some peo­ple said that NOT auto-​​following defeats the pur­pose of “social media.” Because a bad ratio of “fol­low­ing” vs. “fol­low­ers” means your con­ver­sa­tions are one-​​sided. One even said that non-​​followers who tweet “one way” (i.e., they don’t fol­low as many fol­low­ers) are usu­ally tweet­ing unhelp­ful, “spammy,” or “soap­box” tweets.

I dis­agree.

• “Help­ful” could also be defined as appre­ci­at­ing other points of view to sup­port or chal­lenge your own. Even soap­box tweets.
• I said this many times, would you auto-​​follow every­one who propo­si­tions you in a bar? (Rhetor­i­cal ques­tion. Don’t answer, LOL!)
• Twit­ter is the Internet’s water cooler. At least you know the peo­ple you work with to talk with them at the cooler.
• Lately there’s an onslaught of peo­ple who clearly use auto-​​follow so they can claim “I have a huge list”. It’s B.S.
• Ulti­mately, it seems to me that auto-​​follow is one per­son pre­tend­ing to lis­ten, and it seems fake and insincere.
• It’s like “I’ll show you mine *IF* you show me yours.” Paul Myers said it best, “Inter­net mar­keters are a bunch of inces­tu­ous cannibals.”
• With social media, peo­ple have a dis­torted sense of what “friend” means. An acquain­tance, a con­tact, or a fan, doesn’t make them a “friend.”
• Same with Face­book. I add friends who add a mes­sage to their friend requests. They make an effort to intro­duce themselves.
• I ignore sim­ple friend requests, espe­cially if they’re peo­ple I don’t know. Which is the point!
• Most peo­ple on Face­book, who add you as a friend with­out any intro­duc­tion, are usu­ally net­work­ers who want to pitch you their “opportunity”.
• Face­book caps their friends lists to 5,000 because it’s vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to have 5,000 “friends.” Think about it.
• Once you’ve reached Facebook’s limit, they tell you to start a fan page instead so peo­ple can become fans, not friends.
• Facebook’s pol­icy is clear: you can­not use a per­sonal pro­file for pro­fes­sional or pro­mo­tional pur­poses. I know, they’ve told me.
• If you want to enter a con­ver­sa­tion, use hash­tags or @ replies, not auto-​​follow.
• Twit­ter is a big cock­tail party*. You don’t fol­low every­one in the room who merely looks at you.

*By the way, “cock­tail party” was some­thing my wife coined sev­eral months ago, way before Seth Godin men­tioned it on that video I posted ear­lier. Back to the tweets…

• We need to dis­tin­guish con­ver­sa­tional vs. social media. Being in a crowded bar doesn’t mean you’re being social.
• Con­versely, being in a crowded bar and talk­ing to no one doesn’t mean you’re being anti-​​social, either.
• Watch­ing every­one in the bar inter­act­ing with one and other doesn’t mean you’re lis­ten­ing in on every con­ver­sa­tion, too.

SIDENOTE: Some have tweeted that “auto-​​follow” is a way to intro­duce your­self, like a “hand­shake.” They say you should auto-​​follow to be approach­able. I disagree.

• Auto-​​follow is NOT an intro­duc­tion. A dis­cus­sion or con­ver­sa­tion IS. It’s all about RELATIONSHIPS.
• Which is why I pre­fer to fol­low those who reply me, because they’re mak­ing an effort to intro­duce themselves.
• I *am* approach­able. That’s why I’ll respond to tweets with @ reply to me. I might even fol­low them.
• But I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fol­low peo­ple who sim­ply fol­low me with­out say­ing a word.
• Hand­shake? If a ser­ial killer shakes your hand, would you befriend them? Not unless you get to know them first.
• Yes, auto-​​follow is creepy. To me, any­way. I’m not against it, it’s just not my phi­los­o­phy. I don’t like it.
• Hon­estly when fol­low­ing thou­sands, the only way to have a con­ver­sa­tion is via the @ reply!
• But not auto-​​following doesn’t mean it’s one-​​sided! Want to enter a con­ver­sa­tion with me? Just @ reply to me. Simple.
• TV or radio are one-​​sided. Twit­ter is muti­fac­eted by its very nature — fol­low or not. Hash­tags is a great exam­ple of this.
• Peo­ple who fol­low you (with­out an expec­ta­tion of a return fol­low) are gen­uinely inter­ested in what you have to say.
• I’d rather have hun­dreds of real, seri­ous fans who care, than thou­sands of curi­ous onlook­ers who don’t.

SIDENOTE: One said that auto-follow’s sin­gle ben­e­fit is the abil­ity to direct mes­sage (DM) each other. I agree, which is pre­cisely why I don’t auto-​​follow. Here’s what I mean…

• Bot­tom line, I fol­low those who make an effort to intro­duce them­selves to me and whose tweets are valuable.
• Return fol­lows grant you access via DM. I don’t like that. I pay a sup­port staff to han­dle stuff like that.
• If I fol­lowed thou­sands of peo­ple, I’ll get bom­barded with DM’s and sup­port requests.
• It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t have time answer­ing DMs, which takes my atten­tion away from serv­ing my pay­ing clients.
• If I don’t respond to DMs by say­ing “please con­tact sup­port,” which is time-​​consuming, I’ll be accused of not lis­ten­ing anyway.
• Peo­ple who auto-​​follow and want to DM are look­ing for free advice. A free lunch. I don’t do free lunches.
• Here’s a great article/​video by @perrymarshall to explain why I, too, don’t do free lunches: http://​is​.gd/​g​o5P
• Would you sub­scribe to everyone’s blog who com­ments on yours? Of course not. Micro-​​blogging is no different.
• I don’t sub­scribe to everyone’s blog who com­ments on mine. But I do reply to their com­ments. Twit­ter is micro-​​blogging. But it’s still blogging.
• Again, I fol­low peo­ple because I want to FOLLOW them. Not because of an expec­ta­tion of a return follow.
• Social media is about inter­ac­tion. Dis­cus­sion. Con­ver­sa­tion. Hence “social.” Not rec­i­p­ro­cal STALKING.
• Final note, if I fol­lowed a gazil­lion peo­ple, I still won’t know you exist… unless you intro­duced your­self to me with @ reply.
• Besides, I know you exist when you @ reply me (that’s what I mean by fol­low­ing after you approach me). That’s what I do.

SIDENOTE: Some peo­ple said that if the “gurus” don’t auto-​​follow, you can’t access them. You bought their prod­uct, and there­fore you have every right to access them. They say that, if they don’t fol­low back their cus­tomers, their deliv­er­ing bad cus­tomer ser­vice. I’m not only dis­agree­ing with this, I’m also disgusted.

• Just because you bought someone’s stuff doesn’t give you access. Do you expect Bill Gates to fol­low you if you bought Microsoft Windows?
• Pre­cisely. It’s about rela­tion­ships. I mean, would you auto-​​follow every­one who propo­si­tions you in a bar?
• It’s like being in a crowded sta­dium, when everybody’s talk­ing at once, and pre­tend­ing that you’re lis­ten­ing to what every­one is saying.
• Yes, friends have dis­cus­sions. It’s like being on stage at a sem­i­nar vs. being at the back hav­ing a 1-​​on-​​1.
• Exactly. Look at it this way, would you respond to every piece of junk mail with a let­ter say­ing “thank you for mail­ing me!”?
• Fol­low­ers can either be a “fan” or a “friend.” That’s the point about “fol­low­ing” in the first place.
• I FOLLOW because I’m inter­ested in WHAT that per­son has to say. I don’t fol­low sim­ply because I want that per­son to fol­low back!
• I’m THEIR fan. I fol­low with no expec­ta­tion. That’s the point. There’s a dif­fer­ence between “fan” and “friend.”
• Right. You fol­low? You’re a fan. I fol­low back? You’re a friend. I don’t want fol­low­ers. I want fans.

SIDENOTE: Chris Bro­gan, who fol­lows as many peo­ple who fol­low him (and that’s in the sev­eral tens of thou­sands), said to me that if you don’t aut­o­fol­low, you appear as a snobby bas­tard, so there’s no win­ning. My answer…

• It’s all in the intent. There’s uncon­di­tional rec­i­p­ro­ca­tion. And then there’s extortion.
• I guess I’d rather be per­ceived as a snobby bas­tard who doesn’t care than a lying one who fakes that he does.;)

What do you think?

Finally, I’ll leave you with one of the best posts on the sub­ject of Twit­ter. Copy­writer Randy Gage, who I’ve been fol­low­ing for many years, posted one of the best man­i­festos on the use, pur­pose, and ben­e­fits (and down­sides) of Twit­ter I’ve ever read.

UPDATE: Click here to read the follow-​​up post.

About the Author

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