Last week, Twitter launched its new “who to follow” feature, a valuable tool in identifying those with similar interests to you. Who to follow works on the basis that if multiple people whom you already follow are following someone, they might be of interest to you as well.
Besides its grammatically incorrect form (I guess “whom to follow” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily), “who to follow” could use some basic improvements.
Here are some suggestions on how to improve Who to Follow:
- Exclude the” Twitterati”; if my profile suggests an interest in social media I probably already know @scobleizer @guykawasaki and @pierre. If I’m not following them at this point, it’s because I’ve chosen not to do so. I would suggest excluding any user that has more than 20k followers. At minimum, give me a way to filter them out of the list.
- Don’t ask me to follow a user who has never tweeted. Earlier this week, I saw a tweet from @bandhphoto that Twitter had suggested he follow @canon. Makes sense, as B&H is among the largest sellers of Canon photographic equipment. But then he noted that @canon, while having 3,278 followers, currently follows no one and has zero tweets.
- You have tons of data, Twitter (though I'm not sure what you’re archiving). Please mine it more effectively. A few ideas:
- If I've previously unfollowed someone, there's no need to show them to me.
- If someone's on a list I've created, I must know of their existence, so there's no need to suggest I follow them (that's what I currently do with the Twitterati mentioned above)
- Please display the basic metrics for each person - # followers, #following, # of tweets (or better yet, # of tweets per day)
There are also some more advanced features that would be very useful. For example, applying Who to Follow to a list would be a very useful way for me to add more people to each of my lists. Or, let me identify a group of my users and have it calculate new “Who to Follow” suggestions based on those users. There are some third party apps that do similar things – Twiangulate, for example; Twitter could add these types of features or more tightly integrate with Twiangulate and others to handle them.
Of course, Twitter needs to balance its efforts between the early adopter power users and those just coming to the app today. While Geoffrey Moore might argue it's time to ignore the power users and focus on the mainstream, the early adopters are still driving much of Twitter's adoption and these added features should keep those users in mind.
