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A Not-To-Do on Twitter to get more followers

Monday, January 9, 2012

Within the last few weeks more and more of the people I meant to follow on Twitter demanded validation. As a result I’m now following none of them. I run the risk of missing a good link here and there. But the real loss is with them.

Don't ask for validation for people to follow you (photography © Arjen Stilklik)

Asking potential followers for validation seems to be a trend as users have an increasingly hard time filtering relevant content from their streams. TrueTwit.com is one of those validation services. It can easily be used with your Twitter account.

But there are much better ways to handle the information overload on Twitter than that.

Asking for validation in order to allow people to follow you is wrong and I’ll tell you why:

Asking for validation is an unnecessary obstacle that will cause people to loose interest in you. You should make it as easy as possible for other users to find you, follow you, connect with you and share your content with others. Chances are other users are providing similar content. If they are easier to connect with they will grow their list of followers and you won’t.
Asking for validation is a sign of distrust. It automatically shows that you suspect a lot of bad to be out there and you need to protect yourself from it.
Making other users go through a validation process or forcing them to sign up for a validation account is disrespectful of their time.
Requiring validation you are punishing 98% of the users with good intention only to fight the remaining 2% of screw-ups. This is the same with requiring moderation to the comments on your blog. You might want to check your settings there, too.
Even a fake follower is a follower adding to your counter. Look at it any way you want, in the end your number of followers indicates your Twitter authority.
There are humans behind each of the fake and spam accounts. Even a faker might retweet your content. Take a look at their accounts. Some have an unbelievable hugh number of followers who could end up with your message in their stream

Here is what to do instead of asking for validation:

Don’t auto-follow. Invest the time and take a brief look at the profiles of your new followers. If what you see is relevant to you, follow them. If not, they shouldn’t be offended if you don’t. Embrace anyone willing to follow you but be picky about whom to follow yourself.
Services such as hootsuite.com are great to manage content within your stream. They allow you to group relevant content. You could have a stream for family, one for friends, some grouped by topic etc. You’ll have all tweets important to you filtered and easily accessible.
Assume that other users are good and honest unless they prove the opposite. But be aware that there are limits to this rule. Don’t trust people you don’t personally know with your credit card information, your address or even your schedule.

Which Twitter tools are you currently using? Please share your experience with those in the comments.

Filed In: Community

Lindsey Stirling - The greates value comes

http://twitter.com/AnnieAndreHacks Annie Andre

Good points. I had no idea people were asking for validation. I would do the same thing and not bother. Unless it’s someone like Seth Godin whom i know has undeniable content that I MUST HAVE. But even he doesn’t do that.
ps did you switch to disqus?

http://www.philippknoll.com Philipp Knoll

Thanks, Annie. I had no idea people would want to do that, too. But than more and more request from people whom I tried to follow popped up… It’s definitely a thing people should not do.

I switched to disqus a while back and even had it on a later version of the old site. I love how it works and that I can manage comments from the site, the disqus website and also via email which is probably the most important aspect.