Whom to follow, and How many should I follow on Twitter?

You have a twitter account, then you are supposed to have “followings”, “followers”, and “friends” (those who you are following and who are following you).

• Your twitter update page: http://twitter.com/your-username
• Your followings: http://twitter.com/your-username/following
• Your followers: http://twitter.com/your-username/followers

In effect, “friends” are much less important than are “followings” and “followers”. Twitter even didn’t design a devoted page for “friendship”, which itself might have enough implication.

It seems that most people love to have infinite followers, no matter who they are or what they are, but at the same time prefer to meticulously select whom to follow, or even by designing a strict screening rule.

Is that a sound strategy?

Absolutely NOT.

It’s an interesting yet pretty sad fact that most people always want to control what they cannot control.

On twitter, you CANNOT control how many followers you have, simply because whether follow you or not is a decision made by others. What you CAN control is that whom you want to follow and how many you want to follow.

How many followers you have defines the boundary in which your words can spread. On the other hand, how many you are following determines the diameter of your “information-inputting channel”.

One might argue that following too many would create a flood that couldn’t be digested. But the fact is everyone already lives in a flood of information, useful or useless, long before having a twitter account. It simply doesn’t matter at all.

Hootsuite, which provides “group” functionality, makes it easy to devote a single column displaying small portion of your vast followings, rendering information flow easily readable and digestible. In fact, numerous twitter applications provide similar mechanism, seesmic, for example. Oh, twitter itself recently published their own “list” functionality.

What you don’t know is much more important than what you’ve already known. This is the wisdom came from Professor Umberto Eco, who has a personal library of more than 30,000 books.

Others might also refute: “Twitter has almost infinite users, do you suggest that one should follow them all? That’s simply impossible!” Of course that’s not my suggestion! What make twitter fascinating is that twitter has been recording every tweet from the very beginning, which is called “public_timeline”: http://twitter.com/public_timeline.

My own strategy goes like this:

• Follow all of those who are following me.
• Follow all of those who had conversations with me.
• Follow all of those who disapprove my published opinions (which is extremely important for me).
• Follow all of those whose tweets are more of facts than opinions.
• When something is at stake, use search engine instead.