No bullshit social publishing news and opinions. Follow Brandon.
Recently, I decided to unfollow the 281,000 or so folks I was following. You can read why here.
My intention is to follow back the people among the 990,000 following me.
The goal is to use Twitter as a way to coordinate volunteers throughout the A Million High Fives project when it starts in September.
Since I didn’t want to start the following back project yet, I do everything manually and don’t want to get bored from sitting and clicking all day, I thought I’d try an experiment.
Robert Scoble has done two posts (the latest here) describing the folks he’s following on Twitter as smart and influential in the tech sector. Since I’m learning as I go, I wanted to listen to these folks and hear what they have to say.
To be clear:
They don’t need to follow me back, and I’m not pitching them anything. I’m curious. I want to see what the smart, influential people are talking about.
So, I’ll let you know how it goes. I had one guy tell me I was using a bot to follow people, which is hilarious:
imdanehey @BJMendelson, you should really stop using a bot to get people to follow you… that’s a pretty lame way to get 1MM followers
I also had three folks block me. All of the blocking individuals will be identified because, well, if someone does a post saying you’re smart, influential, and people should follow you, and you block those people interested in listening to you, there’s a problem.
As Far As Bots Go
If you consider my right hand a bot, that’s fine. I’ll make sure I do what I can to point out that I’m not, but to answer questions as to how I’m doing this:
I am sitting here manually following these folks. I don’t even know where to go to find a bot, let alone use one. So I made an adjustment to my Twitter bio to let people know, “Yes, I’m really taking the time to sit here through thousands of pages and follow you or follow you back. If you’re not following me, and I follow you, it’s because I either like you or someone, like Scoble, suggested we follow you”.
(And if you want to know where I find the time to do this, you can read a bit more about me here.)
If you have any questions about this experiment, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. I will have a more comprehensive post when the experiment finishes. It looks like I’m about halfway done.
