Don’t Forget to un-follow Those ‘Catch and Release’ Twitter Anglers
Are you like me and keep a close eye on your new followers on Twitter? If you have been doing the Twitter thing for any amount of time, you should realize by now that many people follow you in order for you to follow them. That’s ok, nothing wrong with a little mutual backscratching.
There are essentially two results from this activity. You find your new follower interesting and decide to follow them too. Or, you don’t find them interesting (or worse, Twitter spam) and you decide not to follow; maybe even block them if they are nefarious.
Well, this all seems fine and dandy. But, wait… there is another result. A few days after you decide to follow your follower who initiated the relationship you find that they have already abandoned you. Why would they do this? Well, it could be that you got offensive in some way on your Tweets. But, if you have not said anything remotely offensive, why would they just leave? Easy, they were baiting you… like an angler (“fisherman” for the uninitiated). That’s right, its a little game called “catch and release”.
I guess it works for some people. You might catch people who don’t pay much attention to their followers. Or some may genuinely like that guy or gal’s tweets; so they stay. But I find it particularly disingenuous and phony. It says to me “Don’t Trust Me, I’m A Loser! Don’t Do Business With Me, I Can’t Be Trusted”.
So follow me if you like my Tweets, don’t follow me if you don’t; but don’t bait me, catch me and then release me. As my teenage kids would say, “that’s gay”.
