There has been a lot of reaction to Guy Kawasaki’s recent post on how to build your Twitter followers list. Kawasaki offers some excellent advice on the topic, and he’s pretty much right on, provided you want to get out of Twitter the same thing Guy does. Are you Guy Kawasaki? Are you using Twitter solely to build your personal brand and drive traffic to your blog? I’m not.

For building a Twitter following, I have practiced most of what he recommends, and I have reached a very balanced Twitter friends list of approximately 2200 on each side. And to be fair, Guy’s post isn’t on Twitter strategy, it’s on growing your followers list, which he does a great job on. I just think the idea of growing the follower’s list, what I cynically call Twitter Friend Optimization (TFO) misses the point of social networking.

Kawasaki is a personality, and he is extending the super blogger self-promotional model to Twitter, which may be exactly the right strategy for Scoble, Arrington, Calacanis, Kawasaki and others who use blogging and other social media to market themselves, but is not by any means optimal for an individual who wants to develop and use a network of professionals, or a company that wishes to use Twitter to engage with customers.

I would refer to Kawasaki’s method as the “friendly broadcast method.” My experience and a scan of Kawasaki’s timeline reveal that he is indeed friendly, and actually engages in conversation with followers regardless of their A-list stature. His method differs from the “hostile broadcast method” practiced by other Twitter celebrities who actively court followers but avoid reciprocating.

I applaud Kawasaki for suggesting that Twitter users follow back anyone who follows them, both as a courtesy, and because this offers “more exposure for you,” which can result in additional follows. But this misses the point of “the conversation.” You should follow everyone who follows you (except for spammers and sources of content that are objectionable to you) because it increases your chances for interesting conversations and interactions, not because it increases your chances of adding more friends you will never engage with.

Kawasaki offers all kinds of good advice. I found nothing to dispute in his post, only some ideas for expansion and clarification. Here are a couple of his tips and my reactions:

“Tip 5: Always be linking. The fact that your cat rolled over or your flight is delayed isn’t interesting, so get outside of your mundanity and link to interesting stories and pictures—you should think of yourself as a one-person StumbleUpon. The Twitter pickup artist’s mantra is ABL (“Always Be Linking”).”

I agree about cats and delayed flights, but I disagree about mundanity (which I’m not sure is a real word) in general. Even “arriving at SFO” is interesting to friends who might want to get together. I do look askance at several classes of mundane entries, such as:

• My cat just walked across my keyboard!
• Must. Have. Coffee.

These experiences are beyond mundane, and so universal as to offer no value. (”Hey, look, I’m metabolizing!” “Wish I didn’t have to devote so much time to breathing!”) However, social networking is built on trust, and we build our networks by finding people with like interests we can trust. We do this at first not by tweeting, “any other convicted felons here?” but with an intricate, and timeless social dance. A few seemingly trivial remarks help us establish a connection and common ground.

Trust me, this support for the trivial is new to me, but I have watched it work and there is research that says it’s a big part of why social networks work. Danah Boyd, UC Berkeley PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley School of Information, writes in Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites, (PDF file), “social network sites are providing teens with a space to work out identity and status, make sense of cultural cues, and negotiate public life … By allowing us to have a collective experience with people who are both like and unlike us, public life validates the reality that we are experiencing.” The same applies to adults, who are socialized to some degree, but are often using social media to develop/hone their public sociability skills, and who are also unwilling to engage, even online, with people with whom they don’t feel, at some level, a personal connection.

A seemingly mundane tweet can also be a gateway to a useful discussion. I once tweeted “I had a great idea for a blog post but now I don’t.” This triggered a wonderful discussion on how to come up with ideas for blog posts and how to retain them. I could have simply tweeted, “Hey, how do you come up with ideas for your blog?,” but how boring is that? I wanted something more open ended.

I also disagree about Guy’s linking strategy. It’s too passive and too widely practiced. The shared link is important as it alerts friends to news of interest, and one of the ways I use Twitter is as an intelligent, moderated news feed. (All of my interesting and intelligent friends send links to a wide variety of information so I don’t have to go find it myself.)

But even more important to links about the success/failure of the next generation iPhone are links to unique content. I much prefer when my Twitter friends have their own blogs and tweet a link to a new blog post through which I can read their opinion, which I value highly, of the iPhone, rather than getting it from a blog on CNET. For me, that’s the community in action!

“Tip 9: Repeat your tweets.” This is a good idea, but I would restate it “Repeat unique and timely content.” Use it only for your own blog posts or articles, spaced hours apart, and only while the item is still fresh. Remember, if you’re linking to Guy’s post on adding Twitter followers, and all your friends are, and you’re all repeating it, Twitter becomes a repetitive timeline of no use to anyone.

“Tip 10: Ask people to follow.” Of course you can’t directly ask people on Twitter to follow you, because anyone who can read your message is already following you, but you can have friends ask others to follow you. You should also put your Twitter ID on your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere. One strategy I learned just yesterday from Patrick Byers is to tweet something like, “Just had a great conversation with @patrickbyers on social media ethics, add him if this topic interests you!” This includes both a call to action and an endorsement, and that builds that network of trust. (And, while I don’t believe in Twitter “rules,” my personal code is, if you send someone out to recruit new followers, don’t be rude, follow them back. I always drop someone I’ve added under these circumstances who doesn’t have the courtesy to return the favor.)

So, if you’re all about Twitter Friend Optimization (TFO), follow Guy’s advice to the letter and tweak his strategy a bit as you see what works and what doesn’t. But think beyond the follower count if you want to have genuine relationships, if you want to share what you know and learn from others, on Twitter.

Tags: Twitter Friend Optimization, TFO, Twitter, Guy Kawasaki, followers, following