I’m sure I can’t be alone in having a passionate love/hate relationship with Twitter. I steered clear of it for a long time, believing it to be a timesink and unwelcome distraction to my already communication-filled life. And now that I have joined the throng – as has PC Pro via @pc_pro – I haven’t really moved away from that point of view.
The problem is that the stream of information moves so fast. Even using the quite impressive TweetDeck, I find it impossible to keep track of the endless streams of communications happening. And the thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to hear what the likes of Jack Schofield at The Guardian have to say, but, well, he says so much! As do the numerous other friends, colleagues, influencers and publications that I follow.
Yes, splitting the people you follow into groups will help – so if you just want to hear what friends are saying, then you create that group and add true friends to it – but this in itself is just stuffing the problem under the carpet in the vague hope no-one’s going to vacuum there. Say you create three or four groups. Are you really going to follow what they’re saying?
The truth is that many people – and obviously no readers of this blog, because we’re all so very wise and self-effacing and rounded as human beings – add many individuals who in fact we have little interest in following, in the hope that they’ll follow us and then make our numbers look good.
We then create those groups in TweetDeck, never to look at the “All Friends” stream ever again. And so I come to the question I pose in the title of this blog: exactly how many people can you really, truly follow on Twitter?
I’d say a realistic figure, unless you decide to dedicate your working hours to this device, is 50. And that’s incorporating a fair number of occasional Tweeters rather than the chain Tweeters of this world.
But, I’m willing to admit, I may be wrong. Or just anti-social. If you have time between all those Tweets you need to make, let me know how many people you follow on Twitter… and how many you really care about.