How do you follow that many people?

Time and time again I see these "Get a 1,000 followers overnight " schemes.  You’ll notice I didn’t call them Scams.  That’s because they are real and yes you can add massively to your follower list and do so in an automated way.

Is that a good thing?  That depends on who.  Talk to the marketing/spam machine guy who looks at Twitter as a giant billboard for what they’re selling and I’m guessing they’ll say that’s a very good thing.  Why can’t they add 10,000 followers overnight?  Why can’t they just add them all?

Then there’s the other side of the coin.  The many people who look at Twitter in a different way.  They are not interested in follower numbers.  As a matter of fact they struggle to keep their following in the hundreds not the thousands. Why?

Rain Clouds

I’ve written about this before.  (http://areweconnected.com/2008/12/ive-only-got-two-ears/ ) Think of each follower as a tiny rain cloud.  Each rain cloud adds it’s own trickle to your Twitter Stream (the combined tweets of all those you follow).  Add enough tiny rain clouds and your stream turns into a swift moving current.  To them Twitter is a great place to build real relationships by having real 2-way conversations with them.  Too fast a stream and they lose the ability to catch those conversations that are most important to them.

Personally I have a foot in both camps.  I don’t subscribe to the arbitrary following of mass people but I do want to reach out, meet and start a conversation with as many people as possible.  I’ll follow most anyone who follows me first as long as they abide by my Twitter Follow Policy .  Currently I’m hovering around 4,000 follows (I trimmed almost 700 in deadwood the other day).  Can I possibly hope to have real conversations with 4,000 people?  Not a chance.

Slowing Down the Stream

Like the mass following people that have automated their twitter marketing machine we too can use technology to achieve our goals.  It’s really very simple.   I’ve created in both Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck a special column that I’ve called my “Slow Stream”.  It’s a Group or UserList of 100 of my closest twitter friends.  These are the people I want to make sure I catch.  Think of it as a slowly moving eddie off the side of a Class VI Rapids.  People come and go in my slow stream.  I’ll put people on who have engaged with me in the past, or ReTweeted something numerous times, or even some of those that are icons (like many of those in the top row of my header).

Now that you’ve got the idea, here’s how to slow down your stream using the Seesmic Desktop:

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