Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [91]
Of course, Twitter isn’t meant to replace your offline network of lifelong friends and family — it’s a technology designed to enrich that network. While connecting with your friends on Twitter, you may meet new friends and start to get a better feel for the people (both new and old) whom you can trust.
Although Twitter is useful for supporting global causes and events, the most poignant uses of Twitter can just as easily be found in the simple ways that users help each other, one at a time, all day, every day.
Twitterers reach out to one other through the trials and annoyances of everyday life (such as not having enough quarters at a laundromat) to crises of every size and measure. Twitterers have been support networks when loved ones are in hospital, when couples divorce, when relationships break up, and more. When you use Twitter, your expressions of frustration and loss are often met with an immediate response. Twitter empowers humanity to act humanely.
Connecting with People
Because all Twitterers use the same toolset and (as far as Twitter is concerned) play on the same level, it is remarkably easy to connect with people on the service. The more people you connect with, the more your follower/following numbers go up, thereby increasing the breadth of your network to a sometimes embarrassingly large number of people.
Gaming for followers
Twitter networks are based on trust and reputation, and one of the first metrics that people tend to use when deciding whether to follow someone is how many followers that user already has, and the ratio of following to followers.
Consequently, some Twitter users try to improve their follower/following reputation by collecting as many followers as possible. These individuals aggressively follow hundreds of people with the hope that the followed users follow them back (and many do). These people then unfollow the users who don’t follow them back within a couple of days. The more aggressive “follow spammers” unfollow everyone in order to keep adding more and more and more. In fact, a couple of tools (which we won’t name, and some of which Twitter has already suspended) automate this process. Does gaming followers give you a really high number on your follower count? Yes. But this behavior is seen as obnoxious, unethical, and strongly against the overall Twitter community spirit. It’s also pretty questionable how engaged those tens of thousands of “followers” actually are.
Twitter, in an effort to curb these users, has limited the number of people that users can follow to 2,000 until the user is followed back, in turn, by a similar number of accounts. This is why the more ruthless gamers follow and then unfollow everyone that they target, to avoid hitting the “follow ceiling.” If for some reason you hit that ceiling, you don’t have to do anything but wait for your ratio to balance out, and then you will automatically be permitted to follow more new people.
You personally can help curb these gamers by not following back anyone you suspect is doing this, or even by clicking the block button on their Profile page. When a Twitter account is blocked by a large number of users, Twitter’s spam team investigates the account and suspends any that are violating the terms of service.
Do yourself a favor and do not be tempted to play any of these games. It is not a good way to quickly build a Twitter following. The network generated is random and low-value, and you run the risk of losing your account entirely if other users block you or report you for abusing the system.
Some Twitter users (and we won’t name names) are addicted to increasing their follower count and will use