Twitter. You just can’t win.

I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, as @bobadillavtg.  For ages I was happy enough to just jog along following about 30 other Tweeters that interest me in some way or other.  In return for that, I was followed by less than ten individuals in my little virtual ‘fan club’.  As vintage sellers we all had something in common and in a non-voyeuristic way I was interested in what they were up to – even if it was completely mundane.  They ‘knew’ me and I ‘knew’ them.

Sitting in a north London Iranian restaurant with a cousin of mine – a seasoned veteran Tweeter with a following that resembles his phone number – I posed the question about how the heck he achieved such a big fan base.  “Follow everybody in sight and they’ll follow you back. Well, most of ’em”, he said.  It takes a lot to make me put down my faludeh, but I did.  “What? You mean its THAT easy?”….

So, once back in front of a computer I logged on to Twitter and began to follow every seller of vintage fashion I could find.  Click, click, click, they joined my ‘following’ list one after another and at a phenomenal rate too.  In virtually no time I had bagged no less than 233 Tweeters connected in some way with the fashion biz, most of them online vintage sellers.

Silly boy. Silly, silly boy.

Now, I can hardly find those people I am interested in for all the endless crap that drops into my virtual in-tray every couple of seconds.  It takes me ages to find them anymore and so I give up looking. 

Tweeting like that is a pointless quid pro quo – “you follow me and I’ll follow you back”.  The uncomfortable truth for Tweeters is that I’m not really interested in them and I am non-delusional enough to realise that they’re not interested in me either. Not really.

Where did my erstwhile cousin’s advice get me? 106 followers and rising, the vast majority of whom I don’t even know who they are.  Nice people, I’m sure, but aren’t 9 out of 10 on the street?

It wouldn’t be so bad if Twitter had some kind of ‘Most Favoured Follower” status I could assign to my original cyber-chums that I could use to seperate them from the hoi poloi, but there ain’t. Shame.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to go back to more or less where I was before and a mass cull is pretty imminent.  If those unknowns who follow me stay, fine. If they leave, just as fine. 

There is nothing sad, anti-social or un-cool about having a handful of followers.  In fact, its really cool, because I actually know who they are.

Footnote: Its a full 24 hours since I reduced my following list from 230+ to just 19.   My list of followers, however, has come down by just 2!   That doesn’t mean they love me, worship me, or hang on my every word. Nope. It just means that they follow so many people that they haven’t realised I’ve gone yet.