Every now and then I'll come across a Twitter user who's following an insane amount of people. I've seen people follow anywhere from a few thousand to more than 50,000 people. And I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Personally, I've never understood the point of this. It would be akin to standing in a room with 50,000 TVs. The activity level so high it would be nearly impossible to filter the interesting and important tweets from the boring ones. And tuning in at any one time would give you a short, inaccurate view of what's been happening.
Now, I understand that not all Twitter accounts are individuals. Some belong to businesses and as a courtesy they'll typically follow their fans. In these cases the excessive follows are excusable and I'm disregarding them for the point of this discussion. Some individuals, like Britney Spears, also fall under this exception. Interestingly, other famous individuals on Twitter have adopted a much more conservative follow strategy (see Ashton Kutcher or Lance Armstrong).
But let's return to the issue of "loose following." Following a large number of people doesn't make sense for one primary reason, you can't possibly keep up with even a fraction of all those Tweets. Let's run some numbers:
According to a recent survey by Oxford, the average number of words per Tweet is about 15 words. The average speed a person reads is 250 words per minute. This means the average time to read an average Tweet is about 3.6 seconds per Tweet.
Since it probably takes a fraction of a second for your eye to scan to the next Tweet we'll round the average time per Tweet to 4.0 seconds.
Based on an average of 4 seconds per Tweet, an average person can then read about 15 Tweets per minute. This equates to 900 Tweets an hour, or 14,500 Tweets per day, assuming you did nothing but read Tweets for 16 hours.
According to a recent Twitter Grader study the average number of tweets per day per user is 4.22, which we'll round down to 4 to make the math easier. Based on these assumptions, if you had a fairly average group of follows, and were to do nothing but read Tweets all day, it would be nearly impossible to keep up with any more than 3,625 people.
Let's assume a more realistic time (yet still high) of 2 hours a day devoted to nothing but reading Tweets. In this time you could read approximately 1,800 Tweets, or the equivalent of about 450 average Twitter users.
Any more than 450 and you start missing out on potentially important/interesting Tweets. For example, if you were following 3,500 people you would read only about 12% of your "friends" Tweets. That's not exactly what I consider endearing. And if your goal is to stay informed of news, this is far from the most efficient method.
And let's not forget that we haven't taken into consideration several important factors which would eat into your reading time; responding to Tweets, reading links within Tweets, viewing pictures and more.
In summary, the purpose of following so many people comes into question for me. Do people follow hundreds, even thousands of others just for the sake of following? Or are other motives at play? And if so, what? I have some ideas but I'd like to throw the question out there to see what others think.
What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below.
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