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Why do you follow people on Twitter?
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The tale of 3 different lists - 
In August, the real estate search company, Roost.com (based in SF) began posting a monthly series "Roost’s 50 RE People You Should Follow on Twitter" . We can safely guess that Derek Overbey (the main writer for the blog and all around good guy) created his list for a couple of reasons.
- Shining the spotlight on others is always a good thing.
- A list drives traffic to your site. (that’s always a good thing too right?)
This week Stefan Swanepoel released what he called "The 100 Most Influential People Online in Real Estate". He did so using a service called http://tweepml.org/. Stefan is also a good guy (and a deep thinker). I can see him shining the twitter spotlight on others much like Derek is doing but here’s an interesting thought… By not putting the site on his blog, Stefan wasn’t concerned with driving traffic to his site.
As a matter of fact, the site makes it easy to mass follow everyone of the 100 with a single click! The morning of the list release there was a little discussion about the mass new followers people were getting who were on the list.
Later that morning another List was published. 
Dustin Luther, another all around good guy and deep thinker thought that Stefan's list could use a little refinement. Dustin explained that by using Twitter’s API he was able to pull a list of over 4,000 and then distill them down 50. In his article he explained exactly how and why he did what he did. He published his very own version "50 Most Influential Real Estate People on Twitter" .
These lists are done with the best intentions and each has it's own merit. there's nothing wrong with any of these lists. All three of these guys are great guys and I'm not sure that some of the flack that has gone towards Stefan is warranted. He did nothing wrong, nor Derek or Dustin.
I mentioned this on the radio show this week. I noticed that I was getting a bunch of new followers. When that happens it's usually some spam group or person. My twitter email notification usually says they have 100,000 followers a 1,000 tweets. You don't have to look deeper than that to know what they're up to. So I prepare for the DM's, the Spam Reporting, and the Blocking.
But this new group of followers was very different. People with just 100 followers and 50 tweets. They were mostly all relative newbies to the Twitterverse. Here's my thought - Since these peeps are new and in the learning stage, why not welcome to the fold and show them by example what "we" think the proper use of twitter should be?
Here's a question for you: With these three examples of lists and this post publishing on Friday with the inevitable FollowFriday barrage of tweets being bantered about –
How and Why do you choose who to follow?
- Is it because Derek decided to shine the Roost spotlight on them?
- Is it the ease at which you can follow what some smart guy thinks is the top 100?
- Do you accept the analysis of raw data crunching to tell you?
- Do you blindly follow 5 new peeps because they were mentioned in a tweet?
Or is it something else that causes you to chose to follow someone? If so, what is that ”something else”?
