Following more > Sharing more

A short thought on my recent Twitter activity

I currently follow 840 people on Twitter. I have steadily increased my following count over the past year and have noticed that it has drastically changed the way I use Twitter. The biggest change I have noticed is the rate at which I share. After I crossed the 600 following count, my sharing dropped.

I could not figure out why? I was still using Twitter just as much as before and it started to make me think about why we share our thoughts on Twitter. I recently read Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter after having these thoughts and his anecdotes concerning the early days of Twitter helped me realize why my sharing had fallen.

Jack Dorsey’s vision of Twitter was for the user to share what was happening to her/him. As the product began to evolve, Evan Williams and others understood that its potential was not just in what was happening to you but also the world around you. Twitter’s potential was to be the most up to date and informative news source in the world.

I have never watched news on TV and don’t plan on starting. Twitter will always be there if I want to catch up on the world. This was the reason my sharing declined. I shared on Twitter because I obviously wanted to let people know about interesting articles that I have read. I wanted to share my thoughts on what was going on in the world. As I started to follow more people, 99% of the content that I would have shared was already tweeted multiple times. Therefore, I would only share a specific article when I had a unique take on the topic.

I have considered cutting down on my following count but ultimately I decided that the information I am able to take in from all of the people I follow is way more valuable than what I would provide. My following pointIt is not at a point where I feel overloaded and the effect is that I am a more passive twitter user. Over the past few weeks, I have become content with sharing less and now that I have accepted it, my Twitter experience is better than ever.

It does bring a couple of questions to mind which I have started to think about. At what point will my following count actually start to intrude on my experience. Additonally, what is the average following count that people feel comfortable with? Let me know what you think!