DISQUS

jacobmorgan ed,

remember that there are a lot of new twitter followers each day, they don't know who to follow so they look toward the big names, they see who everyone else is following and then join the band wagon, it's their way of testing the waters. if you recall robert scoble, loic lemeur, and a few other big name folks were commenting on how friend freed was giving them a much higher rate of followers they said that friend feed was better for interaction. what actually happened is that on the home page of friend feed these big names were actually the default for recommended followers, people were following them because friend feed told them too, not because people had any genuine interest in the people themselves.

that being said the main point that you addressed is

"If I find what you have to say valuable, I'll follow you"

that is exactly correct ed. but again, i try to bring value by dm people and replying to them, by interacting with them and engaging with them, that is one way i try to bring value. everyone is different.

the examples you used though were all big name brands and celebs, that does not apply to most people on twitter.

jacobmorgan hi ed,

personally the most valuable followers are ones that engage with me, i could care less if it's guy kawasaki, robert scoble, or any other twitter follower that most people have never heard of, I value the discussion that comes out of the relationship.

i think the only splitting we may see is between corp and personal twitter accounts and even this is a big "IF." take for example the ceo of zappos, or gary vaynerchuk. they both twitter about personal and corporate.

i dont think we will see such a big split as you predict. of course there is a difference between individuals and corporations. individuals are who they are and creating multiple individual twitter accounts just doesn't seem probable in my opinion, twitter groups? perhaps.

i think it would be interesting to actually gather the data that twitter has and run some statistical tests. there are a lot of things that need to be accounted for such as spam, followers you follow someone and then just forget about them, bots, corporations vs individuals, etc.

if people follow me because they "expect" something from me then that is fine, but i can tell you for a fact that without 2-way communication i would most likely not even be on twitter and i would certainly not have 500+ followers. people use twitter for different things and you need to take that into account as well before you recommend that you don't need 2 -way discussion on twitter to make it successful.

Ari Herzog A secondary school teacher once gave me valuable advice on participation in class: For every student who raises his hand and asks a question, there are nine other students who wanted to ask that question.

The analogy can be brought forward to Twitter or any other networking platform. For every person who says something, there are nine people who are interested in the content being said.

Whether I have 20 followers or 20,000 followers is irrelevant. As long as people are interested in what I have to say, the value I contribute, and the engagement I return to them, who am I to care about metrics? Who are you to care?

jfsellsius Good point Ed. I changed the setting to put the comment box at the end of the thread.

mathewi Yes, I think that's part of the problem, Ed. As soon as something got
popular enough on Revver -- like Ask A Ninja or Lonelygirl15 -- they
went off and got their own deals.

Jason Give it time Ed... we're still in beta an only have 22,000 pages that represent ~200k searches. We're adding 1,000 pages a week so it should get better an better over time.