I published a po
st yesterday explaining how I decide to accept a friend requests on Facebook. Today let’s talk about twitter.
I follow a lot of people, and I don’t intend to changing that, but I am cutting those who fill my stream with useless noise. The following are the basic principles I will use to decide weather I follow someone back after being followed.
2) Do you tweet? Something is fishy if you have a thousand followers, follow two thousand, and only have three tweets. Not following.
5) @reply me with an affiliate link, or a porn link, or to any page that tries to sell me something. If I am following you I will quickly unfollow, then I will block and report you as spam.
6) If all of your tweets are retweets, not following.
7) Are all of your tweets broadcasting? Tweets that sound like “new post, blah, blah, blah,” or “new podcast up, yada yada yada,” or even,”the latest sermon is posted.” These are fine, and even expected, I do them too, but if there is no conversation happening, not following.
If every post is a scripture verse, a quote, or even a prayer request, not following.
9) I follow a lot people who talk politics, both liberal and conservative, and I love the discussion and debate, but I unfollow people who only post angry criticism of those with the opposite view.
10) I follow a lot of religious leaders, pastors, authors and thought leaders from evangelical circles, but I hold you to the same standard as those mentioned in number nine.
11) Unless we know each other, or have interacted online before,@replying me asking for a follow back is not likely to work.
Note to Minors: I volunteer at my church’s youth group. I never intentionally follow teenage girls, weather I know them or not. If I am followed by a young lady that I know, I will usually will follow back, but I make sure to follow on twitter or friend on Facebook at least one of their parents, and let them know about the twitter follow from their daughter.
Why I didnt follow you on twitter post.ly/4nd3u
— Gary Carpenter (@garycarpenter) January 11, 2012
good list, Gary. I’m pretty similar in how I follow/don’t follow, but I haven’t defined the terms. On your note to minors, I’m basically in the same boat. And I try to do the same for married women – if I know their spouse and they are on facebook, I’ll friend them too.
I posted this in response to an email, asking why I didn’t follow back. I wanted to have a link to send people when I get that question.Funny thing is I got another one last night, so I went back edited and updated it.
Those are sound policies, Gary. And, in general, good advice for whatever social networking thingamabobs people might be part of anyway.I follow a lot of people in my industry that I don’t know personally because quite often I learn stuff from them and the links they are providing, the projects they are talking about and whatnot. But I don’t follow most people willy nilly just because they ask me to!
I currently don’t apply any shiprenang to my images at all.Apparently images that are exported without shiprenang use an algorithm that softens the edges slightly.It’s something that I’ll look in to rectifying soon.I don’t treat the rule of thirds’ as immovable.I compose the images for how I think they work the best.I think if you consider the entire body of my work most will actually be observing the so-called rule’ of thirds.Thanks for the comments.
Holly, I didn’t mean to imply that I don’t follow people who don’t follow me. I follow quite a few people who don’t know or care who I am, because I want to read their stuff.My issue is with people who follow me and then get upset if I don’t follow them. Lately, when someone I don’t know follows me, I wait a couple of weeks to follow back. Nine out of ten times, they have already unfollowed me.