Twitter’s Not A Contest (Except When I Say It Is)

So, if you’re one of the 202 fantastic people who follow me on Twitter (go you!), you may have noticed this guy following you today:

Kory Mathewson, the University of Alberta Students’ Union President-elect. He’s a great guy; I voted for him (after NOTA and Makhdoom), but like a lot of people, he’s new to this Twitter thing. Fair enough, right? I mean, we all don’t understand stuff at some level. I can forgive him for minor faux-pas, such as his #pureology livetooting gone horribly wrong. We’re good. Well, kinda.

Last night, I challenged him to a race to 200 followers, in the spirit of the CNN vs Ashton Kutcher ridiculousness the night previous. It was a friendly/jokey thing on my end, as most of my toots are. Short story shorter, he won. And he won by a large margin. I was drunk at the time, so I didn’t really care too much; I gave him my congratulations and felicitations, and then I passed out on the Gateway’s couch and slept for like ten hours.

But then the next morning, my good friend Lance Mudryk informed me of an interesting statistic:

@lucaswagner Even though you didn’t beat @korymath, your followers-to-following ratio is a lot better: 2.04 in comparison to 0.38.

Now at the time, I didn’t really process those numbers because a) I was kinda hungover and b) my brain was too focused on learning about how rocks work for my EAS 100 final. But when I came back to it later in the evening, I found something interesting about several of the 666 people he was now following:

He was following nearly everyone who follows me. At first I thought it was some weird coincidence, but from my coworkers at the AICT Helpdesk, to my friends in Computing Science (and their pets), to my fellow student journalists, heck, even a friend from high school—he followed them. It was a wholesale following too: Kory even decided to follow some spambots that follow me.

But because too many people think that Twitter is just like Facebook, they decided to follow him back. As of this writing, Kory now has 290 followers, as opposed to the 186 he had just over a day ago. So congrats, El Presidente. Your plan worked. You’ve now got a whole legion of people who have you marked as someone they follow.

The question is: do they really care about what you have to say?

You got these new followers because you followed aggressively. You cast a huge net wildly into the river of Twitter, and managed to scoop up some fish. But that’s not how I do it, and in my opinion, it’s not the smart way to do it. To continue this ridiculous/awesome metaphor, I’m the dude with the fishing rod over on the other bank. I put really juicy bait on my hook—toots that are humourous, intelligent, and witty—and I see what bites. Usually, it’ll be another fish/Twitter user who also has humorous, intelligent, and witty things to say. Those fish are the best.

So where does this leave you? Well, it leaves you with having to slog through 666 fish and pick out the edible ones. This is your problem, and I’ll leave it to you to deal with it, but I think Lance has already given you some primo advice:

@korymath Go through your following list, ask yourself some simple questions. Do I know this person? Do I care what they’re doing? etc.

But back to my juicy fish. You see, even though I have less followers than you, I have more people who care about what I have to say. My followers are actually following what I’m talking about. When I talk about the LRT, people talk back. When I complain about Twitter, people give me helpful suggestions. Heck, even when I go to Wendy’s, people talk about what I’m eating. There may not be a lot of people reading my toots, but by gum, they’re reading them, and they’re engaging in conversations about them. And that’s why I love Twitter.

So again: congratulations, Kory. And good luck in your Presidential endeavours. But remember: just because 2500 people voted for you doesn’t mean that all of them will listen to what you have to say.

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