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Using the block on Twitter

Some people do it, some people don’t: what is the right way to use the blocking function on Twitter?

On a Sunday afternoon when I’m mostly investigating the world of online gaming, I just saw a couple of tweets regarding blocking from someone I respect.  She says that there’s no point in blocking people who you don’t want to follow, as they can still find ways to read what you are saying, and it is actually harmful in that blocking sends a red flag to twitter about the person.

I’ll deal with the second point first.  Simply blocking a person from following you doesn’t raise a flag to Twitter; using the “Block and spam” option does.  So if I block you, it won’t have any affect on your Twitter life, apart from not being able to follow me.

I block a lot of people, and I believe I have a strong reason for this activity.  I consider my follower list to be the same as an email list: I use Twitter to publicise what I am doing in my business.  So I want to have a good number of people in my Twitter following who are going to be receptive (or at least potentially receptive) to the messages I am putting out.  I also want my Twitter following to reflect my values; as I consider MLM to be the wrong way to make a living, I don’t want to have a following which includes MLM “practitioners”, as I feel that it would reflect badly on me. So I manage my list; I block people who I don’t want to follow or be associated with.

In some ways, a friend of mine who runs the social media activity for an events and news website has taken this further: he has built up a Twitter following of close to a thousand, all of whom are within a certain distance of his home town.  This means that when they use Twitter for a competition in association with a local venue, they know that everyone who sees the tweet directly in their stream will be able to attend the event.  These competitions are now a regular part of their activity, and have lead to Twitter being an important part of their operations.

So blocking can be a useful means of managing your account, keeping it tidy, and of increasing it’s value to your business; don’t be worried about blocking people.

In his post “How small newspapers can make money from Twitter” on the Econsultancy blog, Ben LaMothe sets out a strategy for advertising on Twitter that will depend entirely on any newspaper following it using the block to manage their following, though he does not explicitly say this.  If activities such as “sponsored tweets” – a polite way of saying advertising in your Twitter stream – take off in a big way, we will see more use of the block to control followings and make them more valuable to the advertiser.

This blog post by Nigel Legg originally appeared on Katugas Social Media Services