Skip to content

Follow the people you want to discover on Twitter, weed out the rest

September 7, 2009

When describing Twitter, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and a heck of a smart guy, said something to the effect that LinkedIn and Facebook are for keeping track of the people you already know, while Twitter is for discovering the people you want to get to know.

I take O’Reilly’s statement to mean both discovering people you don’t know, but you’d like to know, as well as getting to know better the people you may already know of.

Powerful statement. And one a lot of us may want to take to heart in our use of Twitter.

With so many people on Twitter trying to get tens of thousands of followers, you’re going to get a lot of people you don’t know following you. As I posted a couple days ago, following others manually, or via software, is the modus operandi of people trying to get followers for the sake of getting followers. The idea being thousands will follow them back.

The last couple days I’ve been weeding out the people I am following to fall in line with the ‘O’Reilly Twitter philosophy.’ Though I have some fine tuning to go, I’m limiting who I follow to the people I want to discover and the people I want to get to know better.

I really had no interest in getting to know the hundreds or thousands of so called ‘social media experts,’ ‘abundance for all groupies,’ or the mass marketing spammers who were following me.

Who do I follow on Twitter now?

  • Clients and LexBlog team members.
  • Lawyers.
  • Other legal professionals, including employees of law firms and companies providing legal professionals with various services and products.
  • Law students.
  • Law professors.
  • Journalists.
  • Mainstream media and trade media tweets.
  • Various technologists
  • Leading new media professionals.
  • Leaders in business, including those in technology, marketing, finance, publishing, PR, and the like.
  • Innovators.
  • Innovative college professors.
  • Leading search and SEO professionals.
  • Leading non profit professionals.
  • Interesting people and leaders in Seattle and the Northwest, including my hometown of Bainbridge Island.
  • Various athletes.
  • People with similar personal interests such as baseball, running, and skiing.

I’m sure there are other interesting folks who fall outside one of these groups. I’m equally certain there are some great people who follow me that I don’t follow back.

I’ll acknowledge that with following over 5,000 people (and growing), I’ll never to get to know you all. And God knows I don’t even try to see all the stuff you Tweet.

But when I do follow the river of Tweets going by, at least I’ll know they’re coming from someone I may want to get to know better. And that’s a good thing.