naomi_jay | The Trouble with Twitter (Reply)

So I've been seeing a lot of this on Twitter lately. People (writers) constantly asking for people to follow them in a follow-back campaign, presumably because they assume that any follower is a good follower. I'm kind of confused by this. I'm not sure having 700 hundred followers is worth anything if those people are only following you to get their own follower numbers up, rather than because they're interested in what you have to say. Secondly, I'm getting bored of seeing this all over my Twitter stream:

Follow me to win X! #followback #win #ebook #loveme #getmeto1kfollowers #omg

I mean, sure having 1000 followers might make you look popular, but collecting cyber friends just to look popular surely died with Myspace, right? Didn't it? And do we honestly think those 1000 people are actually going to ... well ... get you anywhere? Or anything? You might chat sporadically with one or two of them, but are you going to keep up with all of them? Are they going to genuinely help spread the word about your book? Or is it just mutual masturbation?

I'm leaning towards mutual masturbation. People like looking like they have lots of people following them because other people will assume they're all fans. Probably not the case, honestly.

I have about 230 Twitter followers. I don't believe for a second even a fraction of them are people who follow me because they love my books. A lot of them are my friends, a handful of them are writers I admire and love who have followed me back, some of them may actually be fans of my writing, but the majority of them are spammers who want to sell me double glazing or whatever. I'm too lazy to go block those guys. I don't auto-follow and although I do use Twitter to share reviews and news occasionally, for me it's largely a place to think aloud, talk with my friends, and share hi-larious Daily Mash articles.

Maybe my approach is wrong and I should be out collecting cyber friends in the hope one or two of them might buy my books? I don't know. but all this constant "Follow me and I'll follow you!" stuff is tedious and, I suspect, largely pointless. You're not making a genuine connection with the other person, you're just bumping each other's stats. It's kind of the equivalent of holding the door open for someone in a hall. You both feel good but you're unlikely to develop a friendship on that basis. And if I did hold open the door for someone in a hall and they turned round and told me to buy their book or whatever, I'd just be weirded out.

For what my opinion on the subject is worth, I think if you're going to use Twitter as a marketing tool, randomly following anyone who'll follow you back to increase your numbers isn't the way forward. Twitter's about interaction, not blind stat bumping. Of course, I'm not a best selling author, so maybe I'm wrong. But as a consumer (of books or anything else) I hate spam, and as an author, I just cringe at the cyber friend collecting because I just don't believe it works. Strangers with no interest in you aren't going to spread the word about your books. They're going to note that they now have 551 followers, be pleased, and look for the next random.