Monday, December 03, 2012

Confessions of a Twitter follow-slut

People are always asking me why I'm such a follow-slut on Twitter. They want to know what the heck good it is to be following 108,000 people. Am I insane? Is there any conceivable reason for following so many people?

My complete philosophy on this (and all the techniques I used to get to 100K followers) is laid out in detail in a 99-cent e-book, which I sincerely hope you'll enjoy. If you know what's good for you, you'll spring for it. But let me cut to the chase, in case you don't want to buy the book.

My basic M.O. is to follow as many interesting people as I can. Quite a few follow me back. Eventually I unfollow the heartless, unthinking losers who don't follow me back.

This results in me following an awful lot of interesting people, obviously. (Duh.) Can I interact with that many people? No. Only randomly. Can I really follow what people are posting? No, not one by one by one.

What you have to do is be smart enough to use Twitter's excellent List feature. Put various categories of Very Interesting People into various Lists, then check those streams regularly. I have lots of lists. Many of them private, some public. All excellent.

But I also check the main firehose. I do it all the time, actually, because with that many tweeps, I get to see tons and tons of curated links in my stream (and yes, the occasional bit of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness dreck), but the main thing is, I catch huge numbers of fascinating news stories and blog posts by sipping from the fire hydrant. If there's any kind of fast-breaking news story going on, I see it right away. A drone strike kills a child in Pakistan, I know about it. A Supreme Court justice happens to say something rational, I hear about it. A hair falls out of Donald Trump's whatever-it-is-that's-on-his-head, I know about it.

The life of a follow-slut is pretty good, actually.

So please. Don't judge me. Sluts are people too.