Reminds me of an old joke: two kids in a barn full of horse crap. One is crying. The other is digging furiously with a huge smile on his face. When the smiling kid was asked why so happy, he replied “with all of this horse poop in here there must be a pony somewhere”. There is a tremendous amount of crap in the Twitterverse. There are also a few ponies.

My strategy for gathering followers tracks a bit differently. Since I’m in the tradeshow industry, I search Twitter for conversation that contains related words, such as tradeshow, convention, exhibit, event, etc. Once I find a conversational tweet with a specific keyword, I’ll then click through to that person, take a cursory look at who it is, where they are, how active they are (how many tweets, are they engaged with people in conversation or are they just spamming, etc), and follow or not depending on if I think they may offer a chance to actually engage at some level.

I follow people that have a chance of going to tradeshows, or are already going, and are in the US. Typically I’ll decline to follow folks out of the states unless they have several interesting tweets posted.

Every few weeks I’ll go through my list of followers and purge a handful that look like spammers (usually you can do this based on name and photo, or their latest tweet which actually says a lot about them) or people that are disengaged and haven’t had a tweet for months.

It’s not perfect – geez, on Twitter, what is? – but to my mind the 3000+ followers I’ve gathered in just under a year have a high percentage of engagement with Twitter; I get good response and re-tweets of good stuff I send out, and about a third of the traffic to my blog is a direct result of sending out tweets inviting my followers to check out new posts.

To me that makes Twitter quite worthwhile…