Last June at the 140 Characters Conference in New York, marketer Jeremy Epstein (@jer979) gave a talk about his strategy for using Twitter. The approach includes identifying key information providers in his areas of interest and building relationships with them.
Not everyone appreciated his insight, which was shared in the midst of a build-your-network crowd. There are a number of guidelines Epstein uses that I don’t, but I was particularly intrigued by one of his rules: “I don’t follow more than 140 people.”
Jerry Epstein talks about building relationships at 140 Characters in June 2009
Beyond the Twitter-tastic obsession with the number 140, there are a couple interesting aspects to this constraint of network size.
First, it is close to the Dunbar Number, 148. This figure is derived from Robin Dunbar’s work in the early 1990s analyzing social habits of primates. While the exact number is suspect and has been revised upward a couple times by others, the central insight is that our human brains can only manage so many people at a time. I contend that mechanical computation lets us to offload the cognitive load, allowing social network sizes to be considerably larger. However, Epstein’s strategy clearly echoes this notion of cognitive limits.
Second, as a platform, Twitter has been appropriated for multiple uses. Some of these are traditional information broadcast, like CNN pumping out links to their articles. Some are conversational, or require large mutual networks. Many reflect small existing social circles of offline friends. Along with other aspects of Twitter, I most value relationships.
Epstein claims the following limit allows him to consume and respond to all the content he sees, giving him insight into how these important people operate. While there is no shortage of blog posts condemning tweets about mundane things, these details are exactly the kind of cues one needs to strengthen relationships. It’s not clear to me whether Epstein would consider knowing what Anil Dash had for lunch as noise, but I believe this is precisely the information we otherwise only get if we are in the presence of a person. If relationships are valued, then context is, too.
My own network has grown from the 40 or so other early adopters in my geographic and academic community into a behemoth that swelled up over 800 before contracting a bit last month. With each milestone (100, 200, 500), I swore I was following as many as I could handle. It wasn’t until my recent workload surged did I feel I really reached some limit. Even with a bit of a purge—motivated by Epstein’s talk—I am nowhere near a Dunbar number.
I enjoy following people in my current hometown, Bloomington (although I have largely sacrificed other Indiana communities to be able to pay close attention to home). I’m also part of an academic program that adds several dozen new people to my radar each fall. Throw in GeekDad, Twitter folk, and high school friends, and it is difficult to imagine trimming down further. If anything, these sub-communities will continue to expand.
Still, the idea of selecting only 140 of these Twitter friends to follow is intriguing, if only as a thought exercise. The value I get from my network is a combination of information gathering, professional interest, and social obligation—most of which have a real relationship formation or maintenance underlying the flow of tweets. Any contraction of my network would still need to include representative sampling from each of these areas. Starting from scratch and building from my current following list, I quickly went beyond 140 and gave up. This might be a similar problem for about 40% of my tweeps, but the majority of people in my network follow fewer than 140.
If you are a Twitter member, what is the minimum number of people you would feel comfortable following?
7 replies on “Who Are Your 140?”
Interesting thoughts Kevin. I just did a quick check of how many I am following. Was rather surprised to see it was over 500. I also have over 700 following me. I am sure a bunch of those are twitter spammers.
I had one thought that I wanted to add to the mix. When we are able to partition/categorize/group/segment those we are following, I believe that enables us to expand the number of relationships we can effectively manage. In spite of the blurring of the lines between our professional and personal lives, we still maintain some semblance of separateness with many of the people we have relationships with.
I started using Tweetdeck just so I could achieve that. I have a category for locals, design folks, social media folks, sports, investing, and news. I know this allows me to be more efficient in managing relationships as I shift from one world to another. I just started using Brizzly and they have the same thing, although it is currently limited to five groups. With this in mind, I think I am easily able to keep up with the 500+ people that I currently follow. I have also been able to establish and grow new relationships with people who I have never met face-to-face.
I think the Epstein may be missing something about the value of Twitter. I follow Lance Armstrong. Many of us follow our favorite celebrities. I can send an @ reply to Lance, but I do not expect him to reply to me and I am not even sure if he reads my reply. Yet, it does give me a level of engagement with someone who I have in interest in knowing about. Reading one of Lance’s tweets and seeing a picture or video that he uploads right after he gets off the bike in a stage of the Tour De France provides me with an experience that cannot be emulated in broadcast television or other forms of online media. The ability to eliminate the third-party or middleman from the equation is extremely compelling. You touch on this in your post to a degree. So, Twitter has essentially opened up an new channel of communication that did not exist before and I think that is extremely valuable.
No less, I still believe that the greatest value of Twitter for me is the ability to maintain ongoing relationships with my best friends, most of whom are physically located in the same community as me.
I follow approx 600.
There are a couple of tools or automated scripts I’ve used to prune followers down, but on reflection it’s not such a big problem for me. Given the ‘stream’ nature of Twitter, it makes for a more interesting, diverse, and rapidly changing stream. If somebody is particularly heinous, they’re easy to unfollow.
I like what you’ve done in your analysis and I think you challenge me in some good ways. While TweetDeck can help a lot, my preference to quality vs. quantity.
When Jeff Pulver tweeted out that he would be in DC (where I live)…if I didn’t read all his tweets, I would have missed it…and thus a HUGE relationship building opportunity, when I met him in person for 2 hours.
I kind of rely on my 140 to be the curators of larger content and I select them based on their ability, in part, to do that.
I don’t mind knowing what Anil Dash (whom I follow, interestingly enough) had for lunch..I agree, it’s the nature of social lubrication, but I want that to be in the minority. It’s a personal thing.
As for the Lance Armstrong concept, for me, sending an @reply to lance that gets no response just isn’t valuable and knowing what he’s doing…just doesn’t matter.
Again, it’s personal, but the celebritiers in my world are the 140 I follow because they help educate me and enrich me. If Lance does that for some, great.
Either way, great post and thanks for pushing the conversation.
I’ve never used TweetDeck significantly (too much of a space and resource hog for my little laptop), but even if I did, I don’t find value in the groups. For me, it does two things I don’t like: (1) it forces me to label people in a formal way, and (2) it splits my online identity.
Labeling through groups is a different, but related creature to the classification process that goes on in our brains. The brain stuff is internal and scalable; the tools approach is external and limited by the time and energy one can spend in managing those kinds of lists. I’ve had numerous situations where people outside of Informatics provided contributions helpful to those projects. I’m sure formal groups would cause me to look at people in my network in specific ways.
Identity is the bigger thing for me. I used to have multiple usernames and different ways of behaving in different online circles or communities. Managing that segregation, however, is resource intensive and ultimately impossible. I like everyone contributing to my single stream because it helps to keep me grounded online.
Part of my fall research will be looking into the details of how people manage and maintain their Twitter networks. This discussion is great to help me iterate that proposal, so thanks for contributing.
Is having multiple usernames different than using groups in Tweetdeck? Is the reason you gave up the multiple usernames attributed to the same thinking? Just some questions I had after reading your last reply.
Your comments led me to think about a few other things. I have used the twitter website and tweetie. Sometimes I even use them concurrently with tweetdeck or brizzly.
I can give one specific reason why I like the groups in tweetdeck and brizzly that actually feels strangely grounded in the rationale you gave for only having a single stream. When I get super busy and have limited time, I usually only check my “Local” group because those are the people who are most important to me overall.
If their tweets were co-mingled within all of the other tweets I would feel like I missed something important. So I am basically using an external tool to manage my internal prioritization of importance. This is my way of feeling like I am keeping grounded online.
For what it’s worth.
Yes, back in the day, I was feeling some stress trying to manage (as well as remember) which username went with which community and which identity I had attached to it. Even though I have kmakice accounts in many different communities, in practice I use one primarily (Twitter) and only a handful of others to support it (Google, Facebook, Indiana). In all of them, I play the role of me.
There have been some projects (one by Eric Gilbert in Illinois) that have tried to aggregate activity within a stream a bit and make it easier to pull those things out of a single stream. But your point is taken, that there is a hierarchy that forms of which of the people you follow you are more inclined to know about, if time is short.
That brings us back to the inspiration for this post: the 140 upper limit used by Jeremy. In those moments of limited time, would it be possible to theoretically cull your users down to a smaller number? The groups clearly help you do that (perhaps, since there are 1200 local users in Bloomington) by changing the unit from individuals to categories. For me, the group structure wouldn’t work, since all of the people I most value could not be classified that way. (Hmmm. Maybe a “No time to spare” group.)
I can’t see it, for me, my job, what I do and why I do it. But I could see a 140 limit per topic. 140 friends & family, 140 tech geeks, 140 SocMed geeks, 140 healthcare, 140 educators, 140 virtual world folk, 140 writers, 140 musicians, 140 science, 140 astronomy, 140 philosophy, 140 poetry … you get the idea. My job is to be a boundary spanner. I can’t be effectively spanning boundaries and facilitating tech & innovation transfer if I focus too tightly on one small core group.