Twitter Snobs?

Posted by Gabe on October 11, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 3 Comments to Read

This post was inspired by a recent post written by my friend Danny Brown.  Someone called him a Twitter snob, just because he doesn’t follow back everyone who follows him.  He even went so far as to say that Danny shouldn’t be “advising” about the use of Twitter because he himself is not following the “correct protocol”.

This raised a number of issues with me. First and foremost, I believe noone has the right or credibility to tell another person how they should use Twitter.  That may sound funny coming from a guy who loves to put out posts that describe the proper use of Twitter (at least how I see it). But I have always said, feel free to read my posts and do what you wish – it’s a free country.  I have no more authority to tell people what to do regarding the use of Twitter than do its founders. After all they would be the first to admit that it is being used in ways they never dreamed of.  What I like to do is to talk about what works best for me – how I get the most out of Twitter and share it with others so they can benefit as well, taking from the posts what they feel makes sense to them.

Now on to this “follow everyone back” concept.  I have made it clear in my posts that I do not subscribe to this practice.  It has nothing to do with snobbery.  I could care less how many or few followers you have.  If you are a “bot”, (which unfortunately there are way too many of) I will more than likely block you let alone follow you.  If you want to tell me that my teeth are yellow and what I should be reading to make them white then I am sorry, I’ll keep my yellow teeth thank you.  I’m a pacifist so please don’t make me part of your Mafia family. I don’t want your gifts so please don’t ask me to give you one.  I don’t want to take a poll about what type of cat I’d be thank you very much.  I joined Twitter to make real connections with real people. I cannot do that with you if you never converse with people.  I am not interested in your web site if that’s all you are going to tweet about.   How can I find out about you as a person if you are unwilling to fill out your profile?  I can go on and on but the point is I do not follow back everyone. I am not saying that is the way everyone should be either.  That is what works best for me. Period.

I wanted to make one more point about this.  Danny’s accuser indirectly called him an “elitist” for not following back everyone.  Said that he only follows “the elite” on Twitter.  That is also a misnomer. There is no such thing as an elite user on Twitter.  That’s one reason I love it so much – everyone is on the same level.  Some people may have more followers than others, but that I couldn’t care less about.  I read your tweets because I am interested in them, not because I care about who else is reading them.

So what do you do?  Do you follow back everyone?  Tell us about what you do and why you do it.