What’s Your #1 Reason for Following Someone on Twitter?
- 21 Comments
- By Zac Johnson on February 17th, 2009
There’s a new poll that’s making the rounds on Twitter, and it asks the question, “What is your #1 reason you Follow someone on Twitter?“, and was created by lollydaskal. As I’m writing this post, there has been just under 200 responses to the poll. Here are the results so far.
Now what stands out here? Obviously that the two major factors in having someone follow you on Twitter, is that you are “interesting” and can provide some substance, mainly “information“.
Oddly enough, almost 10% of the responses say they have no clue why they are following people on Twitter, which brings us to the next point. When someone follows you on Twitter, do you immediately follow them back? Personally, I try and only follow people that I have related interests or that I know. However, I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of interesting people in the affiliate marketing niche, but just haven’t come across their Twitter… so don’t take it personally if I’m not following you back. If you have quality content and information, you will be followed soon enough!
Twitter is changing everything. In addition to the majority of affiliate networks that are finally recognizing that they need Twitter accounts… it’s even going mainstream as well.Big name celebrities like Britney Spears and now even the NBA are using Twitter to connect with their users. Just tonight I was scrolling through my Twitter posts and saw NBA tweet about a close game that was on. Right after seeing the post, I went to the other room and put on NBA TV to catch the last few minutes.
Just think about the free advertising, networking and new personal / business relations that are being established through Twitter. While others may be concerned Twitter doesn’t have a business model, quality will prevail and Twitter will continue to thrive.
Back to the original topic… What’s Your #1 Reason for Following Someone on Twitter?
If you aren’t already, you also can follow me on Twitter!
- Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Marketing, Web Developement
"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
“Because they followed me first” really should be an option here. Anyway, the fact that informative users get followed isn’t that surprising but I think plenty of the bigger names on Twitter are followed due to their popularity, so I think this poll is a little off.
Sure you might have followed 98% of people because they are informative bu the 2% you followed because they were popular probably have the most followers!
@Dot Com Dud:
Agreed, popularity plays a huge factor in the twitter following game. The polling is also ranged since it’s just a small fraction of feedback. It would be interesting to see all Twitter users set to “zero” followers again, and see who ranks and who doesn’t rank among the top followed on Twitter.
Honestly, I have a tough time FINDING people to follow period, so I just follow most people who follow people I think look interesting. It’s largely to get a reciprocated follow, and then if I find them interesting, I’ll continue to follow them.
I haven’t really used Twitter but it is being talked about everywhere!
The power of it is amazing, so many people go on it.
Zac,
I saw this poll yesterday and responded. I enjoyed seeing that “interesting people” was the number one reason for following someone on Twitter.com.
Twitter has been very beneficial to me since becoming a full-time blogger and Affiliate Marketer in September of 2008. I met you at BlogWorld Expo 2008, along with ShoeMoney, John Chow, Darren Rowse and Chris Brogan.
Then won a free pass to Affiliate Summit 2009 in Las Vegas where I met even more influential people, and saw your great Facebook session with Shoemoney and Alex from Facebook.
While I build my on-line businesses, twitter permits engagement with people who can help me, and hopefully one day I can return the favor.
Pay-per-click marketing is challenging to say the least, and I’m not a natural Webmaster, so WordPress and all of the administrative tasks slow my progress a great deal.
Respectfully,
Nicholas Chase
http://www.twitter.com/nachase
Informattive and interesting go a long way for me. Similar niche also helps. I also prefer if the person doesn’t over-tweet. By that I mean, none stop tweets with links (hundred per day)
I honestly follow people because they follow me. I find it really hard to find people on Twitter, so I haven’t been able to come up with a good way to follow people. If someone follows me, then I’ve found them and will add them to my own list.
I like to keep up with my friends on Twitter…how they find time to micoblog is beyond me though…
Is there a Twitter competitor?
i would say a couple of my top reasons would be 1. they’re an authority/expert in a particular field i’m interested in, or 2. i’ve heard of them/met them before (conf’s, blogging, networking, etc)
Heheheheheh! The great internet popularity contest, broken down and defined properly. I just went to cast my vote and there are 218 votes now, with “interesting” at 47% (103 users), “informative” at 27% (59 votes) and “no clue” at 9% (19 votes) taking up positions 1 thru 3. Twitter is slowly growing on me….
I just joined the Twitter craze, so I am still learning about people following others tweets. It is hard to believe how many people belong to the site and use it regularly.
Who could even have thought of something like twitter becoming popular, just a few years ago? Technology is fascinating in the way that it can be used in so many different ways to facilitate different goals and outcomes. I guess it is high time for me to get my feet wet in the twitter pond.
I started by following some friends and local people I know.
Lately my focus has changed (with the big twitter craze) to marketing side of things so I’m following because of information.
The best thing twitter has given is chance to speak to some big names in the industry using different channel that yet is not that abused.
Also I see a need categorize people more otherwise it ends up in a big mess.
Ah, and if you twitter more than 10 times a day, say bye bye to me as your follower.
The “they are interesting” and “they are popular” choices are basically the same. If you only put “they are popular”, the % would probably be a lot higher.
Experiments on twitter are done all the time and you can see they people follow accounts with huge twitter followers.
-Mike
I’m still trying to figure out the best ways to use Twitter. Do you think it’s fair to think of Twitter as mini-blogs in your RSS reader—that is, only subscribe to the ones that interest you?
Information. That’s it! Of course I follow some people just out of curiosity(Lance Armstrong).
Thanks for telling about twitter. Is there any way to get quick twitter followers. I have 3-4 follower only right now. Now i am following you on twitter aswell.
One they missed is: To get the one I follow to follow me
LOL, interesting?? You mean no one wants to follow those who tweet about “just went to the bathroom” or the even more riveting, “just made coffee” or “just got home”
I follow anyone who follows me after I check out their page to see that they are not robots. If they seem to be autoposting stuff, then I won’t follow.
Haven’t yet joined the band wagon. There are just too many things going on on the internet.