Twitter followers: who are you?
Last summer, I discovered the social media app that’s still making headlines - Twitter. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this chat-driven site, it’s similar to Facebook status updates, but on a much bigger scale.
You develop a list of friends, post short text updates and participate in a constant steam of chatter that circulates across the Web.
Well, when I first signed up, I couldn’t find a single person I knew that actively used the site (save a few work colleagues). So an easy way to build your contact/friends list is to “follow” friends of friends. Apparently, a lot of people use this practice of adding friends which you can easily spot when someone’s “following” # greatly surpasses their followers (i.e. juancarzola is literally following 59,217 people - including ME for some reason - but only has 6,920 followers)
Personally, I’ve struggled with finding interesting things to write in the “What are you doing?” box. I don’t want to tell the whole world that I just ate a grilled cheese because I honestly don’t think anyone cares (they shouldn’t care :)). I’m definitely not a hardcore “Twitterer” or “Twit” or whatever. But, for some reason, I’m getting new followers each week. OK, it’s certainly not like juancarzola levels - I only have 50 followers total and am following 26 people. I still find it interesting that people are coming across my profile, one I have hardly updated, and are choosing to click “follow” underneath my pic. Who are you people?
Maybe I’ll make an effort to be a little more active on Twitter and come up with something a bit more interesting than lunch menu updates. Apparently, there are 50 people out there that are somewhat interested in what I have to say 
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Comments
I get people following me from the city I live in, so maybe that’s part of it. But, nearly every person following me who I don’t recognize has a blog or a website for their band. I can’t help but wonder if they’re trying to drum up traffic by following a bunch of people in the hopes that those people will click back through to their site.
A ‘click and follow’ might be one we view as a prospective friend or colleague, yeah? “Following” seems to sound stalk-ish, but I think on Twitter it may be closer to ‘let’s see if we have some connection w/o having to have commitment.’ Coupled together, we (all of our connections) probably think better.