How do you choose your Twitter friends?

A few of my Twitter friends.

Lately I’ve been finding Twitter increasingly engaging and relevant in both my personal and professional life. I don’t follow a lot of people there: currently I have only 39 “Twitter friends,” only about a third of whom post regularly, the rest sporadically. But it’s useful. It helps me maintain a sense of personal connection at a distance, and it’s even helped me nurture new friendships.

How do I choose my Twitter friends? Mostly they’re people I’ve met or have corresponded with. I don’t tend to follow people simply because I’ve read their blogs or articles or like their music — but that’s just me. I generally feel I need some personal connection before I friend someone on Twitter.

Currently, my Twitter friends are mostly folks I know from the online-media field, since few of my family members or close friends from “meatspace” use Twitter (that I know of). Two of my Twitter friends are people I met last month at a conference in Catalonia. (See, I didn’t call it “Spain” this time!) They post mostly in Spanish, which is fun for me to try to interpret as I struggle to become less monolingual.

I also follow Teeth via Twitter — an aggregation of blog postings from Pakistan, which I find fascinating.

I tend to read someone’s Twitter posts for a couple of weeks and then keep them or not. This is a highly individual medium, and some people’s style of “tweeting” really doesn’t work for me, no matter how much I like them.

Anyway, that’s how I’m reaching out in this new conversational/social medium. What about you? How do you choose your Twitter friends? Please comment below — or reply to me on Twitter, if you follow me there.

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on December 13, 2007 at 8:32 am and filed under Microblogging, conversational media, social media. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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5 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Your approach is the opposite of mine. I used to follow a bunch of work colleagues and friends and people who I’d met through other online methodologies. I got so tired of seeing what ppl had for lunch or their grocery adventures or some mundane thought I couldn’t care about that

I recently just moved to following those who tweet news or useful links. Normally it’s social tech, learning tech or interaction design.

What I basically do now is follow these types of things, re-tweet what I find of value and share what might interest other ppl. I don’t do conversations anymore for the most part as the medium is still one-to-many and doing that is just noise.

But hey, that’s just me.


1. James on June 24th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
A great question Amy! How do I choose my Twitter friends? Firstly as I write I am following 694 and have 1805 followers. My main criteria for following someone is that I get some value from them and so, those who I follow generally fall into a number of categories including personal friends, people/sites from news, technical and social media, but mostly from my interest areas which are fashion and shopping. At the moment my focus is on following people in various fashion industry networks.


2. Sally Green on March 13th, 2009 at 3:11 am
Amy
Funny — I just read your Poynter post on twitter and now this one. Actually – I used Twitter last night to help me prepare for an interview – just as your post had described. I do find that it’s easy to reach a point of saturation – there are only so many conversations you can really follow. I think I’m there right now.


3. Digidave on December 13th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I have only 30 twitter “firends” (those I follow). And, actually, you are one of them.

Mostly they are either real friends, people whose opinions I trust, or people I’m interested in.

BTW, I have 44 followers. Some I know, most I don’t.

twitter: greenskeptic


4. greenskeptic on December 13th, 2007 at 10:18 am
I choose a variety of folks to follow depending on what I am doing.

Most are people associated with online media.

But I am also following people I do not know who live in my city. I am trying to figure out how to incorporate them into a geography blog.

My own posts have changed. Right now I am recovering from surgery. I used twitter -which updates my facebook – to let friends and family know how I am doing. Usually I post urls or quotes I like.

I also set up twitters for my employer. Those tend to be headlines

That helps me find geo-folks to follow

Another way I find folks is by visiting the sites of twitters I like and adding some of their friends especially if they are twitteding events I am interested in. (wish more people had better profiles.

Sent by iphone


5. Mary ann chick white on December 13th, 2007 at 9:40 am