If you’ve been happily living unaware of what a “follower ratio” is, allow me to briefly explain.  Many people in the twitterverse these days proclaim that if your ratio of people following you vs. people you are following is really far apart then this says some bad things about you.  At the very least, it’s bad form, bad manners, and communicates that you do not care about listening to others and only care about others listening to you.  You are a broadcaster, not a social media participant.  You are an irresponsible netizen.

Hogwash.

This is precisely the reason why your list of “friends” on Facebook means nothing now.  This is why Facebook had to create a “hide” feature in your feed so you could hide away friends that you don’t like without actually having the unfriend them.  That’s silly.

One of the primary ways that you find other interesting people to follow on Twitter is through the Following list belonging to the people that you already follow.  The assumption is, “If I am following you, you are probably following some people that I would find interesting.”  So you check out their list and follow some of them.  This is one of the primary ways that Twitter grows and spreads.

Now, if you put pressure on twitter users to follow those that follow them then you automatically begin decreasing the value and authenticity of their list of followed users.  It ceases to mean anything to them.  It ceases to mean anything to everyone.  Soon, Twitter will have to invent ways to unfollow people without actually unfollowing them just like Facebook has done.  Again, that’s silly.

Does anyone actually believe that a human being can keep up with more than 100 active people at a time on Twitter?  Sure.  Create your lists, Tweetdeck filters, and all that jazz.  Go ahead.  You still won’t follow that many people.  You will have the list that you follow that filters out the people you don’t care about, while everyone else gets relegated to a column off-screen somewhere. You’ve in effect unfollowed people without actually unfollowing them and now your “following” list means about as much as your Facebook “friends” list does right now.  Just a hair more than nothing.

Stop the madness.  Only follow people you care about and don’t follow more people than you can realistically keep up with.  Don’t be silly, and don’t succumb to the pressure to make social media socially shallow.  It doesn’t have to be, but it will be if you start following people that you could care less about.

Recently, several people I know have told me that they are quitting twitter, or have just stopped using it because the people they follow say annoying things.  This is a symptom of what I’m talking about here.

As for me, I will only follow people that interest me or that I know personally, offline.  If that means you won’t follow me, then so be it.  At least you will be able to look at who I am following and know that every person on that list has some significance to me.  You will also know that if I follow you, I will actually read what you say and not drop you in a filtered column of purgatory off -screen.  I currently follow a little over 200 people on twitter.  Only 75 – 100 of those are active at all.  Very few of the remaining ones tweet every day.

What are your thoughts?  Am I right on this one?

This is the 4th installment of a series of posts I’m doing to help pastors get themselves and their churches online and plugged in.

VIEW THE ENTIRE SERIES

“Are you crazy?  I don’t have time for a blog, Facebook, and Twitter!”  ~ You

Yes you do.  I’ll show you how to leverage Twitter and your WordPress blog to get your feet wet in the social networking world with minimal effort.  Read on.

What is Social Networking?

I mentioned in my first post of the series that we are now living in a global culture.  Everyone is asking the question “Where do I fit in this new global world?”.  The internet, to a large degree, has been the arena in which people have sought to answer that question.  We’ve seen a shift in the past 10 years or so.  Around the new millennium, people were just trying to make money with the internet.  Since then, the big innovations have been centered around people connecting with other people.  This is social networking.  People finding new ways to connect to each other on the global stage of the internet (at least, that’s how I define it…)

There are a dizzying array of social networking options out there.  Feel free to explore them, but I’m going to focus on the two big ones:  Facebook and Twitter.  (forget MySpace – it’s been thoroughly trounced by Facebook at this point).  Let’s take them one at a time.

Twitter – Beautiful in It’s Simplicity

So be careful not to underestimate it.  Twitter began as a simple question, “What are you doing?”  Not very impressive.  What’s impressive is how the “hive mind” of the web took the simple idea and used it to redefine social networking.

This video might help with the background:

I was very skeptical of Twitter at first. It all seemed very narcissistic to me.  But I finally got convinced to try it and I’ve never looked back.  I’m meeting people that I never would have met any other way, and it’s one of the few social networking tools that I have tried that actually improved my life.   If you need more convincing, here’s 12 more reasons to start today.  For the rest of you that are ready to dive in, here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your free Twitter account.  Choose a username that makes sense and can be remembered easily.  Resist the temptation to give yourself a goofy nickname.
2. Use their tool for adding anyone in your contact list to your follow list.
3. Search for anyone else you want to follow.  You can search by name, topic, whatever.  Check out people you like and see who they follow.  This really is the key to enjoying twitter.  Following people in whom you are interested.
4. Get a desktop twitter client.  The web interface is ok, but Twitter will really come alive for you when you get a nice desktop app for it.  I very highly recommend Twhirl for beginners.  Try Tweetdeck when you get the hang of things.
5. Start by listening and making note of how other people use twitter.  When someone says something you think is interesting or entertaining, Retweet it.  Reply if someone asks a question.  Take your time, ease into it.
6. Remember that Twitter is about adding to a conversation.  Don’t let it become all about you.  Use it to point out interesting things on the web.  Use it to share thoughts, quotes, etc.  Think of Twitter as microblogging. The more value you add, the better your experience will be.
7. Tweet your blog posts.  Every time you publish something on your blog, announce it on twitter and provide a link to the post.  This way you are leveraging your twitter following to your blog.
8. Use your phone.  You can send tweets by text message and use the mobile version of the Twitter website.  Blackberry and iPhone also both have some nice twitter apps.

If you need more help with Twitter, try this collection of resources.

Facebook

I have to confess.  I don’t really like Facebook and I don’t go to it very often.  But, no one really knows it.  If you go to my Facebook profile it will look like I’m there all the time.  It’s not so.

Where Twitter is like a focussed, short, and somewhat controlled connection tool… Facebook is like trying to drink from a fire hose.  It’s overwhelming to me at times.  I’m certainly a minority there… Facebook is HUGE and most of the people in my church are active there.  Here’s how I maintain visibility on Facebook without letting it rule my time:

1. Install the Twitter Facebook application.  It will tie your Twitter messages to your Facebook status.  Once you’ve done that, every time you send a tweet it will show up on your Facebook profile as a status update.  2 birds with one… tweet.  ;-)
2. I use Flickr to share photos with family.  There’s a facebook app for flickr too.  Every time I add a photo to my flickr account, it shows up on Facebook.  2 birds again…
3. Google Reader has a facebook app.  If you use Google Reader to manage your RSS feeds, you can install the GR app and every time you “share” an article in Google Reader, it appears on Facebook.  Notice, all this Facebook activity and I haven’t gone to the FB site once.
4. Now the only time I have to go to Facebook is when someone emails me from there (rare for me because I don’t send emails out from FB) or does something on my profile that warrants a response.  SHhhhhh…. don’t tell.

As you can see, Twitter really is at the center of my social network.  I suggest you set yourself up the same way.

The next, and last, installment in this series will be a guest post from Trendsetting Design to help you use the power of graphic design to enhance your ministry online and offline.

It’s the same complaint that I had when blogging first hit the world like an atom bomb of inane “look at what my cat just did” carnage. Sure, everyone has a voice now, but should everyone really have a voice? I guess so. Honestly, it’s hard not to want to restrict that freedom when your buddy expects you to look at daily updates on the state of his back hair. Or your Aunt wants you to look at 23 pictures of her in the Snuggie she got for Christmas on Facebook. Sometimes it’s best to keep our narcissism to ourselves until we eventually discover that the world simply can’t revolve around more than one person at a time. Now, years later, it seems like some of the “Cat Blogging” has abated and the blogosphere has reached a little more equilibrium (well… mostly). Maybe we just had to get it out of our system for a while.

Now Twitter enters the scene and the immediacy of communication and life-share gets us all hot and bothered again. The problem is that life-share can quickly become over-share.

With this is mind, here’s my advice on Twitter (twittervice?). After all, while you’re reading this blog post the world revolves around me. Right?

CONTRIBUTE. The power of Twitter is not in making your world more centered around you. Twitter is about connecting to a collective conversation. The occasional “I’m bored” tweet is ok. I really am interested in what my friends are doing. But, if you never contribute anything original, never post a link to something interesting and valuable, never add anything to the “conversation” then you need to rethink this thing a little. Do you ever have a thought that isn’t about yourself? Post it. If someone you follow contributes something valuable, retweet it. Stop acting like Twitter is your birthday party where everyone came to see you.

Maybe Twitter is simply reflecting something about all of us that we hesitate to face up to. Maybe we are all far more narcissistic than we think.

That is all. You may return to your own planet’s orbit.

[tags]twitter, micro-blogging, tips, help[/tags]