What type of twitterer are you?
I have been twittering for the best part of a year now and have noticed a distinct pattern starting to emerge when it comes to the ratio between followers and following.
At the start of my social media journey I was blind to much of what was happening and merely selected people to follow with who I had an interest. Added to this was the small band of family and friends who had already entered this world of self edited comments.
There seems to be several different types of twitterers and I shall do my best to categorise them here.
The Free Twitterer. These are the ones, famous or not, who just say what they think. They mix the profound with the mundane and present their followers with a glimpse into their otherwise unseen world. They may occasional use the 140 characters to get your attention on a favoured issue of concern or the launch of their latest book, but these are the exception rather than the rule. They are usually following more people than they have followers, in the case of the non-famous. Or, if a Celeb, they have several hundred, some times thousands, of fellow twitters they have chose to follow.
The Self Publicist: These are the twittering equivalent of the insurance salesman. Every word is aimed at getting you to know how good their products are. They are often following more people than they have followers in a hope that they will build a greater client base through which to grow their business.
The Reluctant Celeb: They seem to be entering an unfamiliar world because they have been encouraged to do so by their agent or another celeb. Their tweet to follower ratio is low having only managed a minimum of messages, usually declaring how much they don’t understand modern technology. They tend to be following less than fifty people
The Celeb Wanabees: There seems to be a goal amongst this group to follow less people than they are following as if it makes them look more important. They only seem to retweet the more famous and rarely respond to direct messages.
The Guru. Every word they offer is a profound statement about life, love, and the universe. You never see anything that reveals who they truly are. I suspect they make maximum use of the scheduling function so that they can reveal their pearls of wisdom on a regular basis.
The Mutual Admirers Club: They too tend to be following only a few select people with the result that they comment on, and retweet, a small number of twitterers. You see the same names and tweets recycled time and time again.
The Leave it to my PA Twitterers: At first it seems as if they are doing all the work themselves until a hasty comment by their PA reveals that they have help in providing regular tweets. The clue is in the lack of personal detail offered in their comments.
What type of twitterer are you?
