I’ve spoken before about this on twitter, but there’s a lot of twitiquette that needs to be worked out for everyone. Equally, what you deem suitable twitiquette might not be what I seem suitable twitiquette.

Who Do I Follow?

Firstly, who follows who?

I have quite a simple rule for this on twitter. If someone new starts following me, I will take a look at them pretty quickly. I may decide to start following them at that point. I may not. I will follow people where I deem that their tweets are:

• interesting
• amusing
• relevant to me in some way
• tweet sufficiently regularly (>1/day) that I am likely to miss stuff if I don’t follow them

If you don’t fall into those categories, don’t expect me to follow you back. I will take a look at what people who-follow-me-but-I-don’t-follow-back have to say from time to time, and generally every time I go through this list I find myself having followed a few more people. If you’re in this list, don’t be upset: I might start following you next time.

Incidentally, this also applies to the blogs I follow. If you link to me, or stick me in your blog roll, I’m likely to want to know who you are, and will visit your blog. But even if I end up reading your blog quite regularly (nods to R. A. D. Stainforth) there’s no guarantee I’ll stick you on my blogroll. My blogroll is my ‘handy shortcut’ to the 10 or so blogs I visit most frequently (which tend to be ones that post most regularly), so please do not be offended if you are not included.

Do I Expect You To Follow Me?

No. Although you are more than welcome to follow either this blog or my twitterstream if you want.

The @Reply

How effective a direct @Reply to someone is probably depends on how they are using Twitter. If you are using it through twitter.com, and you haven’t changed your default settings, it may well be that people are trying to engage you in conversation and you haven’t even realised.

Visit your notification settings. If you haven’t changed them, you may notice that for “@ replies” you will only see “@ replies to the people I am following”. If you are using this setting, other people may send a message to you, by beginning their tweet with @yourname, but you will not see it.

[Thank you @MikePickard for pointing this out]

This may give the impression that you are somewhat rude. Fortunately, that’s quite easy to change. Even more fortunately, it appears that some twitter applications do not follow this rule anyway. Certainly the Firefox addon twitterfox has been happily informing me of @replies from people I wasn’t following, so hopefully I haven’t appeared too rude

Slebs

Sorry, celebrities. I am probably as guilty as the next person of going “ooh, look, so-and-so is on twitter, I will follow them and see what they have to say”. How interesting a particular celebrity’s tweets are (and therefore whether or not I am likely to drop them after a while) will tend to depend upon who they are and how they use twitter.

From some, like @wossy (BBC ‘light entertainment’ presenter) and @krishgm (Channel 4 news presenter), I find out information about their shows, as well as what they have been doing. I’ve found various things about the G20 from krishgm’s tweets; I can generally decide whether I want to watch ‘Friday night with Jonathan Ross’ from seeing @wossy’s tweets.

You’ve got some who are real twitterheads, like @glinner (comedy writer) and @stephenfry, who post regularly about what they are up to, and in @glinner’s case, what he thinks of particular TV shows, films, links people have sent him, issues of the day and so on.

Then there is a selection of people who joined twitter but don’t seem quite comfortable with it yet. These include @kjpeacock (who plays Jen in the IT crowd, although appropriately enough says she isn’t very good with computers), and @eddieizzard. Ah, Eddie.

Eddie posts regularly, but sadly for someone with such extravagant wit and flair onstage, seems to issue only the most banal stereotype-affirming tweets about his day…

Good night to everyone (in the world), or good morning if you’re just getting up. Weather here was really hot today, hotter again tomorrowEddie Izzard [1]

Still in LA. Weather crazy hot. How is everone else today?Eddie Izzard [2]

Sitting on a plane. Flying back to the UK. I hear the weather is good. As you know, I like to follow weather. London here I comeEddie Izzard [3]

I am now in London and the weather here is great! How’s it with the worldEddie Izzard [4]

Now everybody comes out with banalities from now and again, but this was four consecutive tweets, and unfortunately (in my opinion at least) is representative of his twitterstream.

However, it’s entirely up to Eddie what he wants to tweet about. Just because it doesn’t suit me, doesn’t mean someone else won’t love it. And probably hate everything I have to say at the same time.

The point I was going to make is that celebs are different. You cannot realistically expect a celeb to follow everyone. So the rules about not having to follow someone ‘back’ apply to them only even more so. In addition, celebs are probably going to have a lot of people talking ‘at’ them: for example, poor old @stephenfry probably has at least one reply-per-minute in addition to all of the tweets from the 55,000 people he follows.

These @replies, even though they are specifically directed, are going to be very easy to miss by a celeb (particularly if they haven’t sorted their settings out). It would therefore be really unfair to be narked by celebs who never reply, and would instead be more appropriate to decide that those who do reply from time to time are worthy of credit.

But the rule for following celebs should be exactly the same as for anyone else. If you find what they are saying interesting, amusing, or relevant, follow them. But for goodness sake, don’t expect they will follow you back (certainly not unless they are already following quite a lot of people). They are probably busy enough, with quite enough to read.

Life Coaches, Holistic Mammas, International Speakers, Change Agents and Energy Healers

I will be somewhat suspicious of your motives for following me. I can’t see what, precisely, my twitterstream offers that will be of interest to you, and unless your twitterstream fills my criteria (interesting, amusing or relevant), I am not going to follow you back.

In addition, because I’m starting out suspicious, you are more likely to get blocked or reported than someone else. However, because I’m aware that this may be unfair, I’m not going to go around hitting the ‘block’ button immediately. If you stop following me when I haven’t followed you back, then start again, then stop again when I still haven’t followed you back, then start again, that’s normally enough to see you in the block list…

But if you are just genuinely interested in what I have to say, then I apologise for my scepticism and cynicism. But I’ll still not follow you unless you tick my boxes…