I just recently followed Democratic Alliance (DA) Mayoral candidate Patricia de Lille on Twitter and realised that she has 600 odd followers but only follows one person in DA leader and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille. Although de Lille is fairly new on Twitter as evidenced by the number of times she has tweeted (five tweets to date), I do feel public figures ought to take online conversations and engagements more seriously and follow more people.

How can you engage when you only follow one or two people? You cannot in actually sense see what the rest of the Twitterverse is talking about, you cannot engage in meaningful debates and conversation thus rendering your Twitter account useless. If you take a closer look at the Twitter pages of most celebs and politicians, you will be startled (or maybe not really) to find that they only follow a handful of people, they reluctantly engage.

Social media commentator and product designer Rob Goodlatte says that there seems to be trend on the Twitterverse of broadcasting and not listening.  “When you’re broadcasting a message to an audience, you’re not listening for a response — you’re engaging in a one-sided dialogue. The result is a network where people shout past each other to get their messages across”.

Goodlatte also criticises the Twitter count. He says the problem for Twitter is that most people are not likely to attract many followers.  By placing the following / follower count in the top right of the interface, Twitter is saying that those stats are important.  Users unable to attract an audience will be disheartened and leave.  I would add that users who follow a handful of people yet are followed by a large pool appear cool on the social media platform.

However for politicians like de Lille on Twitter, who seek to represent the people, it only makes sense to engage and you can only do so by following more.