What type of Twitterers are you Following?

In a previous post I categorised twitter users into 3 groups; community, broadcaster & marketer. The relevance of this is when you are picking user to follow.

Most users, when they sign up to twitter, are aspiring to be part of a community. This includes broadcasters and marketers, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will all be part of a community. And the communities are created and identified by the relationships, which are the people you are following, and those that are following you.

As a rule of thumb, you will probably find that 85% of people that you follow will be community driven, 10% will be broadcasters and the last 5% are marketers. Now, this is not set in stone, but this trend I have seen from most twitter users that I have spoken to.

You will decide what type of communities you want to be part of, and that is defined by the tweets (yours and theirs). You may want to be engage with people that have interests in pets or model planes, or business related such as other professionals like yourself. You may want to find other motorcycle riders, or more specifically Harley Davidson owners. Or possibly, all of them. These are all communities based upon what they discuss. But once again, within these communities, you will find marketers and broadcasters.

So you have to decide then, apart from the interesting people you want to follow, what else is of interest to you? Firstly broadcasters. You may be interested in following CNN or New York Times for breaking news. Or you may find twitterers that broadcast for very specific things that you are interested in, such as model plane events, or motorcycle news. Remember that Twitter is first and foremost a communications tool, so you can follow anyone and anything that interests you, and as I have said on multiple occasions, in my opinion, broadcasters are a good thing on twitter. They provide an accessible channel for me to get my information. I am using less RSS feeds and relying more on twitter these days.

Some of you are going to be surprise that I included 5% of marketers in my mix. Remembering that marketers can be engaging as well, but their purpose of engagement is to sell you something. But there is a side effect that occurs here. Firstly, to be engaging, marketers need to do something to ‘engage’ you. And this is usually by providing information that may be of value. Secondly, you may be interested in this marketer and their product, so you may want to know the next time they have a special offer, because that is your time to buy.

As an example, many book authors are on twitter, and they are trying to flog their books. This is an interesting one, as you will find that if the topic they are writing on is of interest to you, so the information they provide to encourage other users to follow them may be of value. Finally, I have seen some of these authors give away e-books on twitter, and this may be exactly what you are after. Generally, I don’t think there is going to a lot of marketers in your mix (5% tops), but as you see there is some value there.

One final point, I have mentioned marketers, but there is the dark side of the marketers, the spammers. We have absolutely no interest in them, and I think we all agree that they deserve to go to spam hell. But remember that one of the incredible advantages of twitter, is you really can’t be spammed. There is no way for you to be a target of unsolicited ‘messages’ (at the exception of direct mentions of your handle – but thankfully we are not seeing much of that). But you will not be getting Direct Messages (DMs) from spammers unless you follow them. The thing to remember here, is to look at the people following you, and decide wisely if you want to follow them.

What is the mix of twitterers that you’re following?