Following but not a Follower

I know for some celebrities and comedians etc the reason they tweet is solely for publicity and exposure.  For normal people however the reasons we tweet aren't always that clear.  I mentioned Britain Unzipped in a recent post and some of the statistics it had unearthed, some of the statistics I did find interesting were the reason some people use social networking.

When asked whether or not they had used a social network to meet people 17% said yes and 83% said no, and when asked whether or not people found others' status updates interesting 54% said yes and 46% said no.  Now firstly, given that a social network is meant to be a place to be "social" if only 17% of people actually meet people through them that's a bit of a misnomer, same goes for status updates - if the number of people who are interested and the number of people not interested are more or less equal what does that say about a site like twitter where more or less the whole purpose of the site is to post status updates - or tweets?

If half of twitters users are people who read statuses and the other half are people that post them but don't read others, that would imply that the number of followers you will gain on Twitter will be related to the number of people you connect with who actually read statuses - in other words you need to read them if you want to be followed.  That's not necessarily the case though because in reality there is a rather large proportion of users who live in their own worlds and don't connect with others - the fact that only 17% of people actually use social networks to meet people would imply that only 17% of twitters users would be people who are actually interested in meeting others - if that was the case though that would mean almost a whopping 40% of Twitter's users would be people who read others tweets, without following them.

The next time you use Twitter and see your follower count don't think on it too hard, the reality is that the number of people who read your tweets is likely to be a lot higher.  That's also a little creepy though as from a privacy point of view regularly reading someone's tweets without following them so they know you have an interest is akin to stalking - i.e. following someone without them knowing.