I received a tweet the other day from a follower letting me know I was a royal pain in his backside.

@newmediaphoto. you are an @ pain in the ass. you like to hear yourself tweet.

At first, I laughed out loud. Then I wondered: What was he talking about?  Was I self-promoting too much? Maybe.  I’ve been known to do that at times.

I checked my tweets; most of them were promoting others, sharing information and sharing the love fest at Photo Plus Expo.

Then I checked his profile.  It was locked but I noticed he was only following 30 people with 16 tweeters following him.

I wasn’t mad.  I clearly remember the early days of  Twitter and feeling the same way about someone when I was only following about 35 people.  One day Jay Berkowitz tweeted that he had a friend who was about to hit his 100^th follower and would someone help him out.  I ended up being KeithBurtis’s 101^st follower.

What I didn’t know was  that Keith tweeted and tweeted and tweeted all day long. He was really getting into social media and wanting to find new ways to promote his wood-turning business.  He tweeted so much that he eventually inspired me to write a post at Prosperous Artists titled,  Twitter is not for chatting.  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and unfollowed him.  It wasn’t personal.

About a year ago I gained a better understanding of the platform and started to pick up steam.  I offered more quality content.  I tweeted 10-20 times a day about social media and photography.

My numbers started to climb. Once I was following more than 100 people no one seemed to dominate my Twitter page anymore.  It was a flowing stream of content, opinion and information mostly about photography and social media-related issues.

Over the last summer, when I reached 3,000 followers, I started thinking of Keith Burtis and wondered what he was doing. Keith is now knocking on the door of 9,000 followers. These days he is not as concerned about how to promote his woodworking and is  helping others with social media.

Although many of us from the early days of Twitter have many thousands of followers — some close to a 100,000  – it still nags at me sometimes if I’m that guy dominating someone’s Twitter screen.

With new people jumping on the Twitter train everyday, the answer is obviously yes.

The average number of followers per account is around 70. I know that eventually the people who embrace Twitter for the incredible media stream it is will tend to have hundreds of followers. In most cases,  they will miss 90 percent of my tweets.

So, to the fellow photographer who finds my tweets overwhelming, I encourage you to tear down that wall.  Start connecting with more people in the Twittersphere and start offering valuable information.  You will be much more satisfied and I will not have to live with the guilt of being a pain in your rear.

Rosh