Tech Jounalist Robert Scoble recently unfollowed everyone on Twitter after reversing his stance on auto-following everyone. He wrote a great post on why he did this. Nested in that article was a great bit of information on What Makes a ‘Followable’ Person?
- I’m more likely to follow you if you have a well targeted Twitter profile. If you say “fun guy,” sorry, no. But if you say “engineer at Yahoo working on Flickr.” Well, then, I’ll be much more likely to follow you. Now, take it out of geek ville. Let’s say I was looking for quilters to follow. Well, then, I’ll be biased toward people who identify what kind of quilting they do.
- No picture, no follow. For a brand like BestBuy you better have a logo. Out of 1,600 follows I’ve done this week I’ve only broken that rule a few times and even when I broke this rule it made me think very long and hard about whether following them is worth it.
- I bias toward following people who DO things in real life. Entrepreneurs. Politicians. Actors. VCs. My list, which you can check yourself, is biased heavily toward people who’ve made something of themselves.
- If tons of the people I trust (you know I trust them, because I’ve followed them) recommend you, I’ll add you too. So, repetition is important.
- I look at who YOU follow. Do you follow lots of other geeks and people I like to follow? Then you’re more likely to get me to follow you too.
- If someone smart keeps retweeting you (like how Dave Winer keeps talking about Jay Rosen) then I’ll follow you too.
- If you’re a news maker. Hey, I follow Barack Obama. Why? Well, he makes news. Among other things. Same reason why I follow TechCrunch.
- If you’re powerful, I’ll follow you. I follow both powerful bloggers like Ariana Huffington as well as powerful VCs like Jeff Clavier and powerful executives like Marc Benioff. They probably all will laugh that I called them powerful, but they are.
- Do you have a brand I like? I notice that I’m adding more and more brands I like like Zoho and Evernote and others. But if they abuse that position I’ll unfollow them first.
- I look at your last 20 tweets. If you are just talking about your lunch, I probably won’t follow you. But if you’re talking about a project you’re working on and it sounds interesting I’ll follow you.
- If I’ve met you face-to-face I’m much more likely to follow you. In fact I’ve scanned all my business cards in, thanks to Cloud Contact’s great service, and I’m now matching those up their Twitter accounts and adding them too.
Definitly some great information for those new to Twitter or trying to surpass that magic 150 followers number
