For reasons I can’t quite figure out, exactly 30 people have followed me today on Twitter. If you’re one of those guys or gals (or bots), thanks! No idea what I did to deserve that but working through them has been an interesting exercise and I actually ended up following about 20 of them. Quite a lot of my new followers run successful blogs and I actually learned quite a bit. 
learning new stuff is gooood
So going through their Twitter pages made me start trying to quantify what I’m looking for as a follower. Let’s start with the easiest one.
Possible reasons why I followed you back:
- Because you post interesting Tweets.
- I actually know you or know “of” you.
- Hopefully both of the above
Possible reasons why I didn’t follow you back:
- You’ve been on Twitter for 1 day, have no Bio, and have made five posts – one of them begging for followers. No thanks. Each of those alone is a reason enough to move on.
- You look like you’re posting an RSS feed. I.E. No replies at all and links on every single tweet. I’ve already got an RSS client thanks.
- You do nothing but reply to people. This is just strange. I want to know who you are and just replying doesn’t show that.
- You post too much. Look nobody who follows more than say 20 people can read every message but flooding me with updates and wiping everyone else off my client just isn’t on. For instance I find @guykawasaki absolutely fascinating but he (and his minions) post far too much.
- Your sole reason for using Twitter is to whore out market your website / application / product / etc. I don’t mind someone mentioning their stuff obviously but again, mentioning the damn thing in every post is annoying. It gives you the stale smell of desperation.
Thanks again for the follows everyone. Hopefully someone will find this post interesting and make Twitter just that much better. If something else might draw you in or make you pass over a follower feel free to comment!
–Chris
