fwiw I have at the time of writing 2,271 followers and am followed by 1,388. The reason that I have more followers than I follow is that I only follow back real people with something to say or a business that is in my area of interest where I think I might learn something. I also follow back businesses local to where I live unless their tweets just focus on saying “buy my left handed widget” on a repetitive basis. I’ve blogged all this before so nothing new here for regular readers.

Last week I was sat at my desk trying to upgrade to Widows8 and whilst the machine was doing its stuff I gave our IT guy Jared a driving lesson on Twitter. I had a new follower! Oo 🙂

Looking at this follower I noted that he had 9,000 followers but only followed less than 1,000 himself (actually it wasn’t a he it was a company). This was very suspicious. I could understand if it was a celebrity account. I had never heard of this company before, had no reason to engage with them but they had followed me. I was unlikely that they were particularly interested in me. Their intent was almost certainly for me to follow then back and very likely, having gained a new follower, proceed to unfollow me. That could be the only reason they had a 9:1 ratio of followers to follows.

As an experiment I followed them back and made a note to check on Monday (today) whether they were still following me. Lo and behold, surprise surprise, knock me down with a feather they weren’t.

I have now unfollowed them – there is no reason for me to stay with them because they aren’t interested in me as a person. They just want me to be interested in them. There is something wrong somewhere with that business model. How can a business succeed if it just wants to take and not give anything back.

Anyway that’s my missive for a Monday morning. Gotta go.  Awards entries to write and customer meetings to prepare for.

Ciao