On the other hand, I follow lots of people (friends, politicians, celebrities), news entities, etc., because I’m interested in what they have to say. Twitter is a great aggregator for this! If anyone tweets too much (many times/day) or does aggressive marketing I may unfollow them.

Strangely, I get several ‘requests’ per week from people or entities to follow me, even though they don’t know me (or know *anything* about me) and I don’t know them or have any interest in them! It seems desperate for them to go after people they don’t know and request to follow me anyway, even though there are millions of others they can directly follow.

For regular Twitter accounts I see no obligation to follow someone just because they follow you. If you have something valuable to say, others will follow you. If you have something valuable to say that interests me, I will follow.

I understand Twitter puts a limit on the number of accounts you can follow in one day. That’s a good thing, to discourage spammers.

That sounds so ridiculous to me those softwares, devices and books on “how to gain 10,000 followers in one week”… is this a competition to see who has more followers? why should I bother to build an artificial followers list?? I do prefer, as Kevin said, to interact with few real people that is interested, like me, in learning from each other, not to sell anything. Twitter is now the new spam tool… it´a a pity. We have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

1) Most of the people that I’ve encountered so far, that have several thousand followers are also following several thousand people. Some people tweet a few times daily, others tweet hundreds of times daily. Its hard enough to keep up with the passing thoughts of 3 or 5 people that tweet 250 times daily, let alone thousands.

2) If you follow several thousand people, how is it possible to pay attention to any one individual? By following several thousand, or even several hundred, you’re telling the people that you follow that you’re not really interested in their tweets, because its unlikely that you’ll actually see very many of them.

Ultimately, the only number that means anything in twitter or anywhere else, is how many people care about what you have to say? If you stop following them and they stop following you, then they didn’t care about what you had to say. Be-gone with them. You haven’t really lost anything, just the perception of something. You lost the illusion and clarified reality.

Jeremiah – You’re 100% correct. And I have no problem with people marketing to me, as long as it’s not constantly and as long as they are not blasting me with affilliate links etc. I agree that I can’t expect them to follow me, and I don’t.

Gary – I wouldn’t say brave But yeah, it was a big step. The thing is, obviously I would like to have more followers for some things, like marketing myself. But I’f rather it was targeted. What’s the point of having 10,000 followers if most of them are bots or people who never use Twitter. I’d rather have 50 followers who were all big players in their niche

Social media has and always will be a numbers game. It’s built into and is part of our internet addiction. Personally, if someone follows me then I’ll return the favour.

I say “you don’t know what you like until you try it.” I apply this to Twitter.

You may of however inspired me to do a little more preening a little more often! I’m glad I made the cut Kevin

That said, you’re right that a lot of people on Twitter just want you to follow them so they can broadcast to you. You’re being marketed to on Twitter constantly, even if you don’t realize it. That’s a goal for a lot of people on Twitter, so if you’re not following them anymore, why should they follow you?

I’m guilthy of doing just that although now I manually check and follows back “real” users. I don’t mind following back everybody as long they are not BOTs and not using any script for this account.

I guess I’ll stop following when I reach a certain figure…lol

Anyway, I’m surprised at how fast those followers of yours unfollow you. This just show that a lot of twitter users uses scripts and softwares to do the unfollowing and for following people. At least I’m not guilthy of this..