

How do you decide who to follow on Twitter? - mijustin

Do you use Twitter's "Who to follow" recommendations?<p>Do you see who your friends are following?<p>Do you only follow people you've met in person?<p>What are the deciding factors?
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epc
I follow people I know personally, services and businesses I use regularly,
and people I’ve met and have some sort of ongoing connection to (but aren’t
“friends” or acquaintances). Everything else gets added to a list, and
especially noisy twitterers (not a fixed rule, but if you update > dozen times
an hour) get added to a list and unfollowed.

I find accounts by very occasionally strolling through my followers and the
followers/followees of people I follow, or through blogs/articles I like, or
people who interact with me who are not bots.

I've set a soft limit of 200 for myself for accounts to follow, it once was
over 1000 but I just found that useless in all twitter clients. I unfollowed
almost all celebrities, almost all bloggers I regularly read anyway, and
really tried hard to cut it down to people or services I had some sort of
connection to.

Though I understand the reasoning, the inability to match email accounts to
twitter ids is annoying as I frequently discover that someone I know is on
twitter entirely by accident.

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boopsie
Follow people who are interesting and useful -- ideally both.

Look at your competitors, friends, business colleagues to see who they are
following. Look at what they say. See if you care.

Sometimes someone "matters" to your business even if they aren't especially
interesting because of their position. It might help to know that a
prospective customer is in town, so you can tweet, "Want to meet for lunch?"

Think of Twitter as a radio. You can tune in and listen to whatever station
interests you.

(Note: I co-wrote a book about Twitter for business. That might make me more
reliable... or less. :-) )

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KoryFerbet
I focus on people that I want to interact with, not just see what they're
doing. I use a combination of people I meet, companies that I use their
services, people that my followees retweet or reply to, blogs/writers.

I tend to keep my number small (130 currently) and regularly go through and
remove people that I no longer want to interact with. I don't really see a
point in following 1k+ people as it's difficult to get a true understanding of
what/who they are.

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michaelbuddy
I follow the creators of my favorite FOSS free software and plugins, a couple
other popular tech people in the subcultures. Local popular twitter tech
people, friends, a few peole in hobbies I like and some randoms here and there
from books and articles I've read. I'm most happy with following services that
I partake in as that makes me feel like I can re-broadcast their stuff and
also find out early what's upcoming news.

