I tweet a lot. Predominately, I share external content – according to Twitalyzer, I operate at a signal-to-noise ratio of about 84 per cent.

I pride myself on trying to find the best and most interesting links I possibly can. To do this, I regularly scan a number of different aggregators, subscribe to a lot of blogs, read the tweets of a lot of influential Twitterers, and a bunch of other, top secret stuff that may or may not involve speaking in tongues. I don’t share blindly, either – I actually check out each and every link in full. After all, if I can’t be bothered to read it, why should you?

Here’s the thing – my interests are pretty varied. A lot of my tweets are about Twitter, social media and tech, but I also share stuff about music, movies, TV, politics and current affairs, religion, comic books and lots of other things, too. Pretty much anything that takes my fancy. This slightly splintered approach has worked well for me. It’s probably true that if I only tweeted about Twitter I could significantly improve my targeting, but I don’t want to just talk about Twitter. Nor do I want to talk to people who just want to talk about Twitter, either.

While focusing on one niche has worked well for me on this blog, my Twitter account is a personal one, inasmuch as it’s me, and not a robot or a feed, and I dare say that normal people talk about normal things, which attracts other normal people. And vice versa. This is a good thing.

Most of the time, the response to the links I share is overwhelmingly positive. But every once in a while, somebody will take objection to an article, image or (philosophical or political) perspective that I’ve submitted, and let me know about it.

That’s fine. The problem is: I didn’t write it. I also didn’t draw, compose or film it, nor do I necessarily even believe in it, either.

For some, that doesn’t matter. You submitted it, you deal with the flak. And it’s certainly true that you take a level of responsibility for each and every tweet you share with your network. But only up to a point – if somebody else has a problem with the author’s message, then, by any reasonable measure, they need to take it up with the author.

Or so you’d think. Often, suggesting to the other user that they should probably address their complaints with the person who actually, you know, wrote the article (or drew the picture, or composed the piece of music, or uploaded the knitting pattern) – that’s what the comments box on their site is for, after all – is often ignored entirely or rebuffed with a response that goes along the lines of, “No, I’d rather take it up with you.”

And (for my sins) while I’m prepared to do this for a tweet or two, once you start ranting and raging I’m going to lose interest fairly quickly. After all, and as a reminder, I didn’t write it. And if I can paraphrase Voltaire et al for a moment, defending another’s right to say something is not the same as defending something they’ve said.

The most guilty of this are headline readers – they scan the tweet without even clicking on the link (reading only the first one or two paragraphs if they do), and then let you have it with both barrels. If this sounds at all familiar, then I urge you to stop. Please refrain from making comment on anything until you’ve read the entire piece. Twice. Or at least until reading in full becomes a habit.

Trust me, this will make you a better person. Afterwards, and once fully digested, if you still disagree then by all means go ahead and be angry. But take it out with the author, not the messenger. We’re simply the bridges that provide the connection. If you shoot us down, you’re on your own.

Sometimes things happen to us on Twitter that hurt.

Out of nowhere, somebody who you thought you’d made a connection with unfollows you.

Or perhaps something you shared comes under attack from another person. It might not even be your content, but because you sent it out, you’re the messenger and you get the blame.

Maybe a user who you thought was a friend suddenly bad-mouths you to somebody else. Or criticises you in front of their entire network.

It’s hard not to take these things personally. It’s a virtual world, but we’re still real people, with real feelings.

Rudeness is rudeness, and should be dealt with appropriately, but unfollows are a unique kind of pain – one that involves your pride. And when your pride is hurt, it stings.

Here’s my advice:

1. Take a deep, deep breath, then
2. Have another look at the relationship

Maybe it wasn’t what you thought it was. Maybe it was never anything. Maybe you were just paying lip-service and never made much of an effort to engage with or help that person.

Perhaps it’s a one-way connection. We can’t all be interesting and wonderful to everybody all of the time. Sometimes, one person has a lot to teach another, and – much as we like to think it should – vice versa doesn’t always apply. Teachers can learn a heck of a lot from their students, but not every student has something to teach.

Or could it be that they’ve actually done you a favour? Maybe there was no connection there. Maybe there was a relationship once, many months ago, but it’s now served its purpose. Maybe you didn’t even realise you were following that person.

Bonds on Twitter are often fleeting. Mostly so, in fact. You exchange a few tweets with somebody else over a period of hours or days, and then never communicate again. Twitter is all about keeping your network optimised and relevant, and that rule applies to you and everybody who you’re following, too.

So, if person X is doing a clean-out, and you get caught in the drift, then yes, it can hurt, but it doesn’t have to be end of that relationship. Certainly, unfollowing that person simply because they unfollowed you isn’t the most mature of reactions. But if you’re unfollowing because the relationship has come to an end, then it’s absolutely the right call. And all credit to them for making it first.

Hang around on the internet long enough, and you’re sure to offend somebody.

All it takes is sharing an opinion or making any kind of statement that a second party perceives to be blanket or in any way generalised, and they will take offense. It might be because you’ve made a joke or a silly remark. Maybe you behaved just a fraction out of character. The reason why doesn’t matter. You could write a thousand pure gold tweets in a row, but if tweet one-thousand-and-one is a tiny bit off, that guy is out there waiting to tell you that you screwed up.

You can basically guarantee that even if what you’ve said is completely innocent, insightful or funny to 99.99% of people, somebody will object.

In fact, the more normal your statement is, the more likely you’ll find yourself fending off some crazy who breaks Godwin’s Law before he’s halfway through his second response.

Most of the time, these people don’t know you. They’re making a judgement call on that item alone – they just happened to notice then. We all have people who follow us on Twitter who clearly never pay even the slightest bit of attention to the things we tweet about. Or believe in. Or how we really feel about the subject at hand.

It’s ironic that it’s often these same people who are the first to jump down our throats when we say something to which they take immediate offense. There’s no attempt to evaluate where this statement fits within our history. It’s simply: I am offended. What are you going to do about it?

Worst still are the people who silently unfollow you. Yeah, that told me. If I’ve offended you, I’d much rather you let me know. Otherwise, not only am I incapable of being able to do anything about it, but I’m likely to remain completely oblivious, too. I’d rather have the opportunity to explain my position, especially if there’s a chance it’s a misunderstanding or if I unknowingly (and genuinely) put my foot in it.

Here’s the thing: sometimes you will say and do stupid things. Very occasionally, you may well cause offense to a lot of people. And most of the time, you know when you’ve done this. You know when you’ve said something really awful, even if it’s by mistake. This recognition is important, and because of it you can initiate the steps to repair the damage.

Otherwise, a lot of the time when one person tells you that you have offended them – especially if that person is a total stranger – you probably haven’t done anything wrong. At worst, you’ve made a really, really minor error. Somewhere between a faux pas and a goof.

And again, just as you know when you’ve done something stupid, you know when you haven’t. Don’t be a jerk about it, but if you’re in the right, and you know you’re in the right, let the offendee have their rant and then move on. Let’s call it offensive defense.

After all, as they say: if you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.

PS. The flip side of this is worth a note, too. If you have taken offense to the contents of a tweet, take a moment to read through the person’s recent timeline to make sure things are how they seem. Consider also your history and relationship with that person. Where does this tweet fit? Is there a chance it’s a joke? Or a misunderstanding? We can’t possibly all agree on everything, but a little social compromise and benefit of the doubt goes a long way.

I’ve had a theme running on Twittercism over many months now, and it’s based on a belief of mine that following everybody back on Twitter, especially blind auto-following, does not work. It simply encourages too much spam, too much junk connections, and too much noise, making your Twitter stream, and especially your direct message inbox very difficult (if not impossible) to manage.

Targeted following is one of the secrets to Twitter success. I wrote about this yesterday, commenting on how several of Twitter’s influencers and thought leaders had (for various reasons and using various methods) decided to either reboot their accounts and start over from scratch, or significantly cull their networks on a manual, person-by-person basis.

In my piece, I focused on Louis Gray, who has significantly cut back his network size in recent days after maintaining a 1:1 ratio for as long as I can remember (Louis shares his reasons here) as well as Dan Zarrella, who I thought had a similar policy.

Problem was, this was an assumption I made about Dan that was wrong. I had looked at his data back a week on Twittercounter, but didn’t go any further than that, relying instead on memory – or what I thought I had of it – which led me to make a false statement. While he had unfollowed several thousand users in the past week or so (at least, according to Twittercounter and, as I later verified, Twitterholic), Dan had never had a 1:1 follow:follower policy on Twitter, and he was quick to let me know about it.

I made an assumption, and because of this I made a mistake.

When Dan got in touch, I realised I’d screwed up, and so I edited my piece and removed the reference that suggested he’d ever embraced a 1:1 following ratio. Really, in retrospect, this was a pretty minor, almost throwaway comment, but it was wrong and so it needed to go. I replied to Dan’s comment and apologised, and figured that would be that.

This was the second mistake I made. On Twitter, Zarrella threw what could only be properly termed as a ‘hissy fit’. Even now, several hours later, I’m not really sure what led him to this behavioural pattern, because I can’t for the life of me see what I said that was deserving of such an attack. If I’d blatantly defamed the guy or said something unforgiveable about his friends or family, then I’d be a little more understanding of what went down.

Thanks to Bettween.com, you can track this conversation here. (Opens in a new tab for convenient reading.)

Here’s what happened in a nutshell:

1. Zarrella proposed that I couldn’t count (which, in light of my mistake, was probably acceptable).
2. He then suggested I deliberately lied in my article, and this proved I was ‘wrong’. I’m not sure exactly what I would have had to gain from lying about his stats, but clearly there was money and glory to be made, somewhere.
3. He then had the sheer arrogance to propose that I might want to “learn how to do this social media thing a little better,” and sent me a link to his book on Amazon. I don’t and have never claimed to be a social media expert or guru, but I find it slightly bemusing that Zarrella made this pitch while acting in such a blatantly antisocial manner.
4. He then informed me that he didn’t actually care, as “7 retweets of nonsense isn’t concerning.” The article is up to 19 as I write, but I’m guessing it doesn’t impact Dan’s radar until it reaches Mashable-numbers.
5. After I expressed my surprise at his attitude and behaviour, Dan responded that he only acted this way towards “unfounded social media experts”, something which (again) I’ve never claimed to be.
6. Finally, Dan suggested that my article was like “rooting through people’s garbage”. This, of course, from a guy who has made a career out of studying and analysing the accounts of hundreds of thousands of users on Twitter and other social platforms.

This last item bothered me the most. How could an individual who makes a living analysing volumes and volumes of data about user behaviour be so quick to go on the attack against somebody he doesn’t even know?

The problem was that Dan made an assumption, too. He figured he already knew me, making a judgement call entirely on one piece of writing. And even if I still cannot work out exactly what it was about that entry that irked him quite so much, that doesn’t really matter. If Dan had taken a moment to read a few more articles, or even to take a few deep breaths, all of this unpleasantness might have been averted. As it was, he just came over like an arrogant, egotistical jerk. You just have to compare his reaction with that of Louis Gray or Jesse Stay to see the difference in class.

And while I do think that these kinds of negative encounters with thought leaders and influencers in social media are, thankfully, quite rare, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen behaviour like this.

(Hey, maybe it is me, after all.)

But you want to know what the real zinger is? I checked back through my SocialToo emails, and Dan unfollowed me on Twitter just a couple of days ago during his recent blitz. And while I don’t have any idea how long he had been connected to my account, he’d clearly never paid attention to any of my tweets. And I tweet a lot. You’d have thought, or at least hoped, that some of that would have got through.

I guess that’s where I made my third mistake. It seems that Zarrella wasn’t all that interested in targeted following, after all.

Back in August, I wrote an article that noted how Robert Scoble had unfollowed everybody on his Twitter network, and was basically starting over. This mass-unfollowing began to gain momentum around this time, and pretty soon several of the bigger names on Twitter, many of whom automatically followed back everybody who followed them, were seriously optimising their Twitter stream. Even Jesse Stay, whose SocialToo platform was the benchmark autofollower (but has other value), decided to start over.

Why? As I said at the time, Twitter simply doesn’t work when you follow thousands and thousands of people. And when you auto-follow, it’s even worse, as it won’t be long before the bulk of your stream is made up of spammers and bots, and even worse, internet marketers.

In the last week, both noted Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray and Hubspot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella have also had what could be politely referred to as a ‘bit of a trim’. Louis’ follow-to-follower ratio has been 1:1 (or thereabouts) as long as I can remember.

Here’s what they’ve done over the past few days:

Scoble subsequently hand-followed over seventeen thousand users manually, and while he’s often the exception that proves the rule, the rest of these guys – Jesse, Louis and Dan – have taken Scoble’s lead and manually followed several thousand themselves, too.

And here’s the good news: because they’ve done this, it means you don’t have to.

What’s happened here is this group – and many others like them – have stripped away all the clutter and noise that comes from following everybody, which has then massively improved their signal and focus. Their network is now targeted and optimised. Everybody needs a follow policy, but this is particularly true for the thought leaders and influencers.

The best part is because these guys have adopted a targeted following system, you don’t have to follow everybody they do to get the access to all that good stuff. You just have to follow them. Collectively, Scoble, Louis, Jesse and Dan follow around thirty-seven thousand people.

To have access to all that rich information, you just have to follow four.

Sure, you won’t see everything they do, and you’ll naturally be exposed to their own bias and prejudices about what they decide to share, and what they decide to ignore. And this is where your own targeted following comes to the surface. Each of these guys are pretty sound, and I think come with a boatload of trust and clout. So I’m happy to follow all of them, and for what it’s worth, I give them my endorsement to you, too.

(It’s pretty much all tech, of course, but you knew that anyway.)

But you can’t just follow a handful of people on Twitter, as that’s worse, in my opinion, than following everybody. Where these guys have taken another look at their networks and essentially started from scratch, so can you. You don’t have to unfollow everybody to do this, either. Just take a day or two to carefully analyse your followers, making the cuts where necessary and appropriate. Don’t be scared – trust me, Twitter, your Twitter, will improve dramatically as a result.

For me, Twitter works best when I’m following three to five hundred people. For you, the magic number might be less than a hundred. Or no more than a thousand. Whatever that number is, only you can find it, and it’s absolutely worth putting in the work.

On that, I think when Chris Brogan finally caves, and gives up a sizeable chunk of that 108,529 on his following list – which really must be an absolutely nightmare, especially for a guy who’s all about engagement – then we’ll probably have the final piece of this cycle in place.

Brogan has written about how he likes to follow back everybody because it gives them a chance to contact him via direct message, which is admirable, but I know from personal experience of testing automatic follow-backs – even if they’re done on manual basis – that what you end up with in your direct message inbox is 90% spam, ‘thanks for following me’ auto-DMs and that TrueTwit validation nonsense that only mass marketers and spammers seem to use. And as a result, the direct message system just falls apart, as most of your day ends up being about clearing it out.

Brogan is one of few, bonafide shining lights in the world of social media, but if you take a moment to peruse his following list you’ll see how it’s made up of so many of the kinds of people the rest of us try to avoid (and usually block). It can’t be long until even he cracks. And the smart money will be on Darren Rowse next.