Saturday, April 28, 2012

A Follower Count Represents...

We originally posted what is to follow this short intro on our Tumblr account last month. We have been inspired to post it again, here, because of "trends" - not the official trends, just what we see people commenting on a lot.

Also, we've been culling our numbers again. However, we have not been unfollowing active people - except on a VERY rare case they are just asstards, are more boring than paint drying in the savannah. Some of us have standards, after all, and we'd like that to extend into our social media usage. Note, standards, not to be confused with being "Elitest".

Most of the accounts we are unfollow are business accounts that we followedback in the early days of our account. Ones with 20,000 followers, who follow everyone back, in order to have access to their feed and post things about apps, technology, and other various bits of advertising, propaganda and sometimes nothing more than "famous quotes" (surprisingly those are usually people who say they are writers or authors).

Those accounts who look like they follow everyone back, so they must be "nice" accounts? That was us, we did that for a long time...but then we couldn't give due attention to all the real people, so we started using lists...but then we ran out of list room, so then we started a locked account that only we have access to in order to make more lists. Then we started thinking...this is dumb.

So, at risk of being unfollowed back, which is happening in huge amounts, we decided to start unfollowing MORE of those big accounts that are hooked up to auto-unfollow applications. Sticking with them out of fear of unfollowing just inspires businesses to keep advertising on Twitter (dislike) PLUS a follower account...well...

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A Follower Account Represents…

Fuck all.
With cartoons!

Do you know who is following those big accounts with severely disproportional follower percentages?

Accounts that haven't Tweeted, or been back to Twitter, in anywhere from a month, or more, sometimes since the day the account holder decided to find out what "this Twitter is about".
HUGE accounts who are on Twitter to purely peddle books, films, entertainment, information...who never read a Tweet.
Porn bots, until they get suspended...which can be weeks, even months.
Tons of dead accounts.
PURCHASED FOLLOWERS
Who the fuck cares.

So, when you look at a follower count and think "this person doesn't follow everyone back, they are an asshole"...Think.

Think...why would they...keep following dead accounts, spam accounts, accounts that don't have a real person behind them, only automated applications used to monitor Twitter...people who tweet about stupid fucking shit all day, like "Oh, I'm going to the bank now" who don't make it "interesting"...accounts that all they do is quote music, people from history, poetry other people have written, lines from movies.

Having said that, someone who is following less than 1000, who has over 7000 followers is simply in Twitter for "the game"...you know the "game". *coughs* Favstar. (likely...though not always)

Want to follow accounts that you'll enjoy? Follow who you find funny, regardless of their follower account.

Don't worry about how many people they are following back...be interesting if you want followers, if you're not interesting people won't keep following you just because they initially followed you back anyway.

Twitter is layers of entertainment, communication, social networking, etc.

Even we follow people who don't follow us back...people we find funny. Want honesty? Almost 1/3rd of our followers are people who haven't been on Twitter in months, some since we started Tweeting October 13, 2010. It's why we're not following them back, why would we?

Follower accounts represent jack all at the end of the day, the same as follower account means jack all in off-line life...

But whatever.

You keep thinking it matters, we'll keep not giving a fuck about THAT.

For the love of all that is sanity, we plan to start unfollowing people who keep making Tweets about needing followers, or the amount they need to get to some stupid fucking follower account achievement.

Like we've said, we never came to Twitter to be fucking "popular", we plan to leave the same way we came in.

[originally posted: March 23, 2012 at http://jstcallmefrank.tumblr.com/post/19786835140/a-follower-account-represents]

List of more social media entries here on this blog:
2012

2011