Twitter Pic

I spent some time yesterday cruising through my Tiwtter (www.twitter.com) followers and their followers and their followers and so on.   I began to notice something - when clicking through someone’s list of followers, I tended to click on avatars that were visually appealing or, at the very least, sparked my curiosity. 

The idea here is that even with a web service that is designed for people to send text messages to a broad audience, the visual associated with that person is an important factor in gaining followers.  In an effort to attract followers, people naturally tend to use the techniques practiced by advertisers for many years: sex, humor, good color mix and the occasional traditional (boring) head shot. 

These images are selected to be a representation of who we are - a way of saying, “hey, I’m attractive, follow me” or “check it out, I’m a really funny guy” or “indeed, I am so artistic it hurts.”  Whatever the case may be, each of us makes a choice to show our sexy, funny, artistic or just plain boring sides to the world.  In the case of Twitter, it’s in an effort to get people to follow you - to have people interested enough in you to care what you might have to say, whether it’s about a great piece of software code you wrote or that you stayed up too late last night having drinks with all of the wrong people.

As of today, I am following 34 people and am being followed by 26.  Is my Twitter pic effective?  Could be… I only know 10 of the people that are currently following me.