The beauty of Twitter is that we can use it however we want: tweet lots or not at all; follow many or none; interact with others or remain a silent watcher. We get asked A LOT about why we decide to follow so many people, so we thought instead of trying to fit the explanation into 140 characters, we would write a short post explaining why.
Followers…. numbers…. statistics…. get it? :p
We joined Twitter for ONE reason – to interact with the Warcraft and wider gaming community.This is something we can’t do in our personal lives, as we don’t have the type of family that supports spending money/long hours on games and being indoors (there’s a whoooole other post there!). There are very few people we know personally who we can share our ‘gaming life’ with and most don’t game themselves, so reaching out and being part of the community is really important to us.
It started off as a way to be ‘real’ people behind our modest little blog. To see other’s blogs and share what we were up to. We followed all of the big Blizzard reps and other larger names in the community as a way to feed our obsession with news and Warcraft chat. Soon, we followed more people who actually interacted with us back (!!) and we were thrilled at making all these new friends.
In our own opinion, Twitter is a two way street – you want ‘ordinary’ (you know what I mean!) people to care about you and what you have to say? You pay them the same respect. We LOVE to hear what our followers are up to, and we hope they feel the same about us. It’s not about numbers. We don’t care if there are 2,000 people’s tweets to read – we (most of the time) want to know what everyone is doing and how they’re feeling. How can we expect people to listen to what we have to say if we can’t pay them the same courtesy?
That’s us, the little slow one at the back 😀
Obviously, not every one of our followers feel the same. We get many people who follow just to get a follow back, then unfollow us – I’ve been advised that the more people who follow you/the less you follow is a popularity thing. We also have people follow us thinking we are an RP account and are sorely disappointed when they don’t find two gnomes talking about… snow/engineering/life being short and stuff. We also have our own rules: we won’t follow anyone who swears obsessively or who post a lot of porn or who are continuously negative. We also like to follow mostly gaming accounts, as this is a lot of what our online personas are all about, We may miss some Tweets, especially at night, but we manage to read about 80% and we don’t want to read stuff like that.
We know people don’t like reading through lots of Tweets and we know people might like to post many pictures of naked Animé characters – each to their own. We strongly feel that unless there’s a good reason not to, we should… and we WILL…. follow thus, interact with as many people as we can.
I could go on and on about Twitter cliques (take you back to school, anyone?), trolls and politics, but it’s not even 9am and I need my breakfast. But I hope this rather convoluted post gives you an insight behind our reasoning for following so many.
Finally… if there’s something you really want us to see, please tag us or DM us. We do miss things when life gets in the way of our online presence but we DO want to be a small part of your Twitter world!