Where Have all the Followers gone?

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary , whose name popped into my mind this morning as I discarded yet another email alert from Twitter: “Joe Blogs is now following you on Twitter!”, with an exclamation mark to get me all excited.

DELETE.

But it made me think of how frequently I receive these email alerts, and Management Measures , so I waded back through my email folders (I have a folder for each month’s emails, “Trash201110, Trash201109, Trash201108 etc.” and made a quick tally of emails announcing my Devoted Followers:

		Cumulative
Mar	14	14
Apr	22	36
May	11	47
Jun	20	67
Jul	25	92
Aug	23	115
Sep	33	148
Oct	20	168
Current		52

Now I had also received by email twitters statistics for the merry week of this, and in it I noted “Followers=51; Growth this week=2; Prediction next week=49”, and leaving behind the question of why a growth of 2 this week might lead to fewer followers next week, I pondered why, after 168 announcements of followers, I have retained only 30% of the camp.

The rest have de-camped, it seems.

“BeerGuy”, “SexyTeen” and “DeadMeat” along with them, I hope.

Twitter, of course, never sends me an email lamenting the loss of a follower, only another young hopeful who has been led to believe that by following me they’ll look good and land that multi-million dollar contract.

“Give up!”, is my message. I’m having enough trouble as it is landing a multi-thousand dollar contract, let alone boosting total strangers to vast riches.

How about you?

How many followers have you attracted and lost, and do you care?

Talk to Me !

How Many can You Follow?

If you’ve been following my saga on Twitter you will know that I’ve been puzzled about the vast numbers of people who follow me for no apparent reason, and the number of people I follow, for reasons that escape me after a month or two.

There are people I keenly want to follow, tweeps on whose every word I hang, but too often they get swamped out by a burst of activity from others who I’m following.

And how on earth did I end up following “BeerGuy”?

So I’ve Made an Executive Decision

Right now I’m following 50 tweeps.

That’s too many.

I will reduce that number by ONE at the start of each week, until I reach 40; then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

Then I may reduce that number by ONE at the start of each week, until I reach 30; then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

I rather think that following 30 tweeps; seriously following by being able to engage with them, is a commendable activity.

Trying to follow 300 is just plain stupid.

Talk to Me!