Webwares twittereer par excellence, Don Reisinger, has recently posted a number of articles about Twitter on WebWare. He also has had a rather massive increase in followers during the last couple of weeks which of course is great.
The other day Don wrote an interesting post about 5 twitter improvements we’re still waiting for. Also the comments of that post includes a number of interesting features out of which perhaps the possibility to trace threads may be the most urgent one in my opinion.
One feature Don asks for specificly is a qwitter feature which enables you to see who of your followers that seize to follow you. While most articles I’ve read on this issue argues you’d do best to stay away from Qwitter, I find this to be a highly interesting point that Don does.
For a company it is often of high interest to see when customers churn and more importantly, why they churn. Is it the pricing? Is it the quality of the product or service offered? Or has the customer got a better offer from a competitor?
Although I’m not particularly fond of quantifying social media into economic measures, I would agree that a high number of followers could be translated into economic value.
If we eventually will see intermediary self-powered businesses flourish within the realm of Twitter, it may become interesting to see why followers quit following, as there will be an economic incentive for the twittereer to minimize churn.
Now since Don stated to be interested in why followers quit following him (and I’m one of those who started and quit following him) I first thought that I’d comment the article mentioned above. However since WebWare demands membership in order to comment and I, at the time, didn’t have incentive enough to create an account, I thought I’d do the commenting here instead.
A couple of weeks ago I read a post from Don called Why you should follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. At the time, this post came quite handy since I’d been pondering about this issue myself.
Up to now I’ve used Twitter for mainly two reasons. The first reason is that it is more immediate than RSS if you use clients such as Thwirl or TweetDeck. The other reason is to follow people that I find highly interesting within the sphere of social media such as Chris Brogan, Rohit Bhargava, Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Kim and Brian Solis, just to mention a few. There are plenty more.
If they follow me back I’d be flattered, if not I’m sure they have enough to thing about other than adding followers all day long.
So, spurred by Don’s post I started following him, just to see at first if he’d follow me back, which he did almost instantaneously
My next experiment (I’m really not this evil) was to see if I’d be considered signal or noise. Since he at the time had over 2000 followers (now +3000 followers and counting) I couldn’t understand who he’d be able to tender such a vast amount of followers.
Accordingly, I threw him a couple of replies and one or two DM:s just to see if he’d respond. Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t work very hard to get Dons attention, but since he wouldn’t reply when I tried to contact him, I thought that I wasn’t that interesting after all (sounds sort of bitter, huh?).
And when he the other week explicitly started asking for more followers I kind of had it, not least since that sort of contradicted his inbetween post How not to get Twitter followers: Our tips, I guess I took his advice literally.
So, Don, since you asked… I just thought you should now…
The picture comes from H-K-D
