What exactly does it mean when someone follows you on Twitter?

Answer:  it depends.

Chris Brogan wrote a blog post – Is Engagement More Important – where he talked about Twitter followers.  He described the following exchange he had on Twitter concerning the author Tom Peters:

I told my gang over on Twitter that they should follow the legendary Tom Peters, author of several books that impacted my life. Some of them wrote back, “why should I? He doesn’t follow many people back.”

Chris made two major points in his post:

1.  Following someone on Twitter isn’t necessarily engagement (i.e. interaction with the person who is using Twitter):

When I choose to follow, it’s because I grant you the permission to send me a direct message. I will not likely see your standard every day tweets. At over 110,000 followed, it’s a technical and mathematical impossibility…  So, when I follow you back, it means that I’ve given you one step up on the hurdle. But that’s not the whole game.

2.  You can get a lot of value by following someone because of the knowledge that they share, even if it’s not directed specifically toward you:

But what if Tom Peters’ Twitter stream is full of useful nuggets and links to really useful stuff. Is it any less valuable? … But my point is: the information is more important in many cases.

I believe that Chris is absolutely correct with the second point.

I’m not so sure that I agree with the first point.  While it may be valid for him, I don’t think it’s representative of all Twitter users and I don’t think it’s the way that some (or a lot of people) think.

Consider the following:

• Chris has over 100,000 followers and he follows back almost everyone, so his ratio of following to followers is close to 1:1
• In my case, I follow 2140 Twitter accounts and in turn I am followed by 3490 Twitter accounts at the moment; my ratio is not quite 2:3 but it’s close to that.  There are plenty of people who follow and are followed by many more people than I am, but I’m kind of in a middle range in terms of size.
• I would wager that the vast majority of Twitter users follow and are followed by less than 200 people (note:  I have no research to substantiate this, but it seems reasonable to me)

I agree that Chris could not (and probably should not) try to follow every Tweet that is squirted out by each of the people that he follows.  Even with my smaller set of followers, I know I can’t do it either.  The third group of people just might be able to do that if the people they follow only publish a few Tweets each day.

I would argue, however, that there is still intent to at least try to follow some of the Tweets from some of the people that you are following.  I don’t believe that most people will follow someone else for the sake of allowing them to DM you (put differently, for the sake of being able to receive private messages from the people that you follow).  You follow someone because you might find their stuff interesting and with the hope of interaction.  From a practical point of view, someone with Chris’s network of followers might be providing a courtesy by allowing the DM.

There’s still a problem with that, though:

How could anyone keep up with the DMs (the direct messages that Chris refers to in his post) when you are following 100,000 people?  And trust me, a guy like Chris will be getting plenty of DMs because it’s a chance to ask something private that you might be embarrassed to do in public.  Like, say, trying to get Chris to link to your junk or otherwise trying to do business via the DM.  It’s like the classic “red phone”:  the direct line to the president or the king, so to speak.  Except, of course, the red phone rings constantly with DMs and, although it’s like having a voice mailbox with no size limit, how could you ever check them all without a massive amount of time and effort?   Another case in point:  check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s Twitter page.  He very clearly states that he never checks DMs.  Finally, try doing a Google search on Twitter DM spam:  you’ll soon get the feeling that the direct message might not be the best way to try to contact someone, especially if they’re following tens of thousands of people.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I think that most people aren’t motivated to follow you so you can send direct messages to them.  Maybe the likes of Tom Peters and various celebrities do follow people so they can be contacted directly via DM:  I don’t know, but a lot of them don’t follow very many people.  Twitter Lists are still a new phenomenon and not everyone uses an application to manage Twitter, so for many the best way to keep track of what’s happening with someone is to follow their Twitter account.

I think it’s still perfectly natural to assume that people are following you on Twitter because they want to see what you have to say (yes, I know, there’s at least one other GLARING exception to this rule:  people who follow you with the hope that you’ll follow them back and help make their followers list much, much larger in some vulgar attempt to eventually make money off of it).  I accept that other people will have different motivations (e.g. Chris Brogan or Tom Peters) for following people.  Experienced Twitter users know how to follow you without following you, so they’ll do things differently.  And so on.

But back to one final point:  I can certain emphasize with people who wouldn’t follow someone like Tom Peters, who apparently follows a fraction of the people who follow him and interacts with very few.  The prospect of engagement and interaction is pretty enticing and it’s natural to get a little thrill when you are followed back by someone that you started following first.  If they don’t reciprocate, you then have to compare this to your goals for following and then decide what to do next.  Again, I still agree with Chris’s second point:  sometimes the information is valuable enough to outweigh a lack of interaction.

Now, over to you:  what do you think?  Do you follow people on Twitter just so they can send you DMs?  Or do you follow people on Twitter in order to see what they are Tweeting?  Or is there some other motivation?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.