The unsuspecting traveler will see no harm, as the follosauras can be adorable, in the right light. So they will follow and presto they will have a new follower. The problem with the follosauras is that they don’t care what you have to say, they won’t read your tweets, retweet your messages or connect with you in any way.
The point of social media is to build relationships. The follosauras thinks that if they have 50,000 followers, they will have something of value, because all those people will be clicking on their links, passing along their wisdoms, and after a while, the money will start to roll in. What they will actually have is 50,000 other follosauri (the plural of follosauras), who also don’t care what the people they follow say, and are under the same delusions. It becomes a giant herd of people tweeting, ‘Hey, look at me.’ Sadly, none of the follosaurasi ever achieves much, because they aren’t listening to each other.
One might ask, what is the harm in allowing the follosauras to roam around with your legitimate followers? At present there isn’t much harm, other than cluttering up your data. Let me explain. I track my progress at relationship building by charting the number of followers each week. If I let the spammers and follosauri continue to follow me, it gives me a false sense of the number of real people I am connecting with. I certainly never follow these people, but I usually take it one step further. I block them. I don’t want them following me.
Let me explain why. When I see a tweet from someone that looks interesting, I will check out their twitter page. I want to know if this person is offering interesting links, if they have a blog that is worth reading, and if they might be someone I would like to get to know. It has become apparent that the number of followers alone isn’t a good measure of the quality of this person. The metric I use to judge a person, is their Followers to Listed ratio. Lists are a relatively new feature and have yet to be ‘gamed’. A list is a way to manage the people one follows. If you show up on a person’s list, then you are putting content onto twitter which they find to be valuable.
If a person has 10,000 followers, I would look at how many times they are listed. In general, someone who is listed by 500 (5%) of their followers is probably a good person. If someone has 50,000 followers and is listed 83 times, then it is a safe bet that nobody likes their tweets. They are only promoting themselves, they are a follosauras, and they have devoted their time to building up a really impressive number of ‘fake’ followers. They haven’t built up any friendships. They don’t care what you have to say, so why bother trying to connect with them?
The other benefit of ‘blocking’ the follosauras is that it is really fun. Ha!, you didn’t trick me into following you and clicking your tweets for your new get rich quick scheme. I win.
There is nothing wrong with following some people you don’t know each week. I do this too. Every week I try to find some new people, that I want to watch and read. I have found lots and lots of wonderful people this way. They are my friends now. I read their blogs, and some of them read mine. But if you only follow someone, to get your follower number to grow, then you just don’t get it. You are destined to spend a lot of time, tweeting to a huge room of follosauri.
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