*** The below post has been transferred without comments from another blog which was hosted on Ning. The post has been backdated to its original publishing date ***

I got a Tweet the other day and it was from someone I did not know in a field I was not interested in. The post said something to the affect of ‘I have followed you, now follow me and then unfollow in order to complete the opt-out process’. When I started my Twitter account, I went to some of the communication and PR twitter accounts that were of interest to me and then followed some of their followers. The thought was that since I was interested in PR, communications, etc, there would probably be some interesting posts from other people interested in the same topics that I am.

I had been thinking about Twitter accounts before I received this message, but after receiving it, it only reinforced my original thought – Twitter is just about getting the most number of followers, no matter how you do it. It seems like a competition, or a one-ups manship. If you have a lot of followers, you are seen as a person of ‘influence’ in your respective field. Since professionally I would say Twitter is used primarily by communication professionals either as themselves or as a member of an organizational team, it becomes a competition of who has the most amount of followers.

I followed about 800 initially and at the moment have about 400 followers, and there is no way I am able to keep up with all the traffic. Whenever I get onto Tweetdeck, it is just a matter of luck whether or not someone else is on at the same time and sends something I see of interest to me.

It is still fun. I like the direct messages with random people; a sort of brief meeting, or an exchange between people while passing in the online hallways of Twitter High School. Unless I want to create a new Twitter account and follow only those individuals that I have the time to scan through their tweets, I am stuck in the land of follower numbers. Looks like my current ‘influence’ ratio is 877/418 (following to followers), slightly under 50%. Am I concerned? No. Can I keep up with all the traffic as is? No.

Oops, got to go, I just saw I have a new follower…