2010 is a year of experimentation for me. As my regular blog visitors know, I have made some dramatic changes in my life this year. 2010 is my year to focus on my business, my 25+ year old business, Design Resumes. It is also the year for me to take my research in social media to the next level and make sure that I am using it in the most effective way.
Let’s take Twitter for example. When I joined Twitter, initially, I was amazed that people were following me, people I didn’t follow. I felt wanted and somewhat honored. When people talked back to me, I was amazed. I grew the numbers I was following by researching interesting people and to some extent following back the people who followed me.
During the past summer, I got busy and didn’t tweet much. When I came back, I felt disconnected and thought it was because I wasn’t there and people didn’t know me any more. To some extent, that might have been true, but there was another cause. I had gotten to the point of following 1500 people. Most of the people were clueless that I was even following them and I hadn’t really communicated with most of them.
On the advice of Jim Connolly, I decided to decrease the numbers I was following so that I could actually see the conversation happening. I knew that would have an effect on my follower numbers but it didn’t really matter because I wasn’t conversing with most of them anyway. When I am creating resumes for the sales profession, one of the keywords that often comes up is relationship building. For example, this bullet point from a Territory Manager:
- Generated over $3 million in annual sales through interaction with builders, building strong long-term relationships, which created repeat and referral sales.
You know how that client did that? He met with the builders. He built their trust. He shared their pain, rejoiced in their successes, and they in turn continued to buy his product. Relationship Building. It happens one connection at a time not in masses.
By letting the numbers on Twitter that I was following grow too big, I couldn’t connect any more. There was too much input. Too many voices. It was like one of those movies where a person is surrounded by voices talking, yelling, and screaming and after awhile, it just becomes one loud roar… no thread of conversation is left, just a constant roar, a constant din.
I am only a few days into this experiment but do you know what is happening? I am talking to people again. I hear their voices (ok, their tweets). I find myself getting to know the people I follow better. I can rejoice in their successes, like HRMargo celebrating her new position. I can share snow shoveling strategies with InterviewAngel and TheJobQuest. I can see new posts from my favorite bloggers, like Robin Easton.
I would guess that everyone has different levels in input they can handle. For me, 1500+ was too many, I needed to reduce my numbers. Right now, I am following 240+ people which is probably still a few too many but I can hear the conversation.
If you were to use Twitter for job search using my old strategy, you would fail. You would get lost in the shuffle and you would not be able to network. You couldn’t build relationships. Relationships are built through little interactions, building familiarity, confidence, and trust. However, if you would try my experiment and keep your following down, you will find yourself getting to know a community and communities network.
What do you think? How much input can YOU handle?
Talk to me, I talk back.
For anyone who wonders about the photo today, it is the other view from my office windows, Granite Peak Ski Hill. I love being able to see forever.
Hi Julie,
Well, interestingly, it was a Twitter exchange that led me to be here commenting…!!
Your article really made me stop and think about how many people I’m following on Twitter and, indeed, how many of them I have real conversations with.
I recently found a site that lets you see who are your “friends” (you follow each other); who do you follow who doesn’t follow you; and who’s following you that you don’t follow. I was amazed at the number of people who’d made the approach to follow me, whom I’d then followed back (flattery?!), and who’d then clearly immediately unfollowed me. It was making their numbers look good, but was doing nothing for my Twitter stream. Safe to say, I unfollowed most of them and learned an important lesson.
There are people I follow who don’t follow me, whom I’m happy to follow because their content is good. But I’ve recently stopped following a couple who send out conversation bait messages, but then don’t follow up. Eg, “It’s snowing in London today. How is it where you are?” My rule is three strikes and you’re out!! That’s further thinned my stream and I notice how I don’t miss their egocentric garbage!!
Anyway, your post is helping me take all of that to another level, and I thank you for it!
Twitter has been an interesting balance for me. I have been grateful for HootSuite and the Twitter list feature to help me filter the conversations.
I also try to have reasonable expectations. There are some people I follow and who follow me back, and I can hope they are deriving the kind of benefit from my tweets that I get from them. The chances of meaningful conversations with some of these individuals may not be great, but that’s OK.
Then there are the interactions that I have with you and some others I have met on Twitter that go further than retweeting and other surface exchanges. It’s pretty amazing when these connections develop. Thanks for being part of that, Julie
Melissa´s last blog ..Setting Limits on Social Media Use
Julie…I need to do this too. For now, it is simply on autopilot, which is bad, but the real world for me. Unfortunatly, I miss what so many good people have to say.
I need to clean up this twitter….
I agree that you have to make a choice about who you are going to follow on Twitter. You want to hear the conversation, but you also want to be a part of it. Some people follow simply to get a follow back. This does no one any good if there is no two-way communication being built over time. People are more likely to listen to you if they have some sort of personal connection to you, even if it occurs randomly through a social media platform. Twitter is a great tool, if you know what you are trying to do with it. Brent at InterviewAngel is a cool cat. I’m glad he’s one of the people I follow. If ever I lose track of the flow of conversation, it’s time to prune the vines.
I’m following just under 500 but a lot of them aren’t very active. Usually my stream is manageable enough that I can read 90% of it unless I get really busy.
There’s one person I follow that had over 70K follows/followers last I looked. There’s no way he can read more than 1% of that firehose and I’d be surprised if he can even keep up with @replies, though he does answer me so maybe he does.
I like to keep it cozy and actually get to know people in my stream rather than having them all rush by.
Michelle
As I said, I was coached by our mutual friend, Jim Connolly, who has trimmed the people he is following down to 91. I don’t know if you know the full story but at one point, he had something like 23,000 followers and he followed them all back, I believe. (Jim can correct me, if I’m confused) Twitter did something strange and his account had issues. So when he came back, he came back with a different philosophy.
I knew that something went wrong after I hit over 300 but as I said in the post, I blamed me for disconnecting. I’ll have to continually refine my strategy because otherwise I think I will end up back up there again.
There are a lot of great people in the world to talk to but there are limits too.
Wow! I knew Jim had a lean and mean Twitter strategy, but I had no idea of the story. And following only 91 people…! I feel the need to ask him what kind of criteria he’s using to keep it this small.
And your point is right – there are some great people out there AND there are limits. I admire you for taking the bull by the horns on this one and am going to be interested to see how it works for you.
Christine Livingston´s last blog ..The Silent Rise of the New Work Pioneer
You are welcome, Melissa! I don’t use HootSuite yet, I installed it but find Tweetdeck meeting my needs. I look for real connections that grow as my primary reason for being on Twitter. Thank you for growing into someone I can talk to beyond a RT!
I’m not going to take credit for this strategy, GL, because Jim Connolly actually taught me so he gets the credit. His suggestion was to take short breaks and reduce the numbers. Pick your favorite beverage (coffee, water… or his favorite currently, green tea) and review those you are following and eliminate old ones that are not using Twitter, ones who are not feeding you with information or value on topics you care about, ones that are not people you converse with. I did a crash course and reduced in a couple days but you could do it in the little bite strategy, 5 minutes at a time.
Thanks for your comment, Johnny. You are totally right on all things, including Brent. We got to know each other better recently and I can appreciate his genuine concern for others!
Me too, Michelle, actually the strategy is working very well for me now and I am enjoying Twitter once again. When something major like the earthquakes happen, I can still use lists to sort by topic and the people I am following are very widespread and diverse so I get plenty of information from them. Bigger isn’t always better.