One of the debates among Twitter is:
Should I follow everyone who follows me? Or should I only follow people I want to follow?
This debate still goes on, but here are some thoughts that might help you with your decision. If you follow everyone that follows you, the benefits are…
- You can send each other private messages.
- The person whom you are following feels good that you are following him or her, and this generates goodwill.
- You never know when/if this person could become a strategic alliance in your business, a client, and/or a referral source.
Some Twitter users feel that if someone is taking time to follow them, then they could at least give that person the same courtesy and follow him or her back. People who share this philosophy usually have close to the same number of followers as tweeps they are following.
The Flip Side
On the other side of the debate are those who do not want to follow everyone who’s following them. This rings true for many celebrities or high-profile individuals or businesses. You’ll see many that have tens of thousands of followers, yet are only following 10 people.
Then you have the non-high-profile people but active Twitterers who have a lot of followers, but their ratio of followers to those they follow is lower. For example, they may have 5,400 followers and are only following 900. These are people who either don’t have time to go in and follow everyone or they have decided to follow only those they want to follow. Many do this to appear a part of what is referred to as the “Twitter Elite.” They have tens of thousands following them but really don’t “need” to follow them back.
I follow just about everyone who follows me. However, I quickly unfollow people who are spammers (always selling) and I don’t follow people who appear to be (I’ll be polite) less than professional. I mention this now because there are tools that allow you to highlight your favorite tweeters and group them by category. This makes it easier to follow larger numbers of people.
What’s the bottom line?
Do what is most comfortable for you. This is your business and you are marketing it, and you might want as many people to know about you and your services as possible. A best practice, however, is not to automatically follow everyone, but check out their profile first. There are many spammers and porn industry sites on Twitter, and you don’t want to follow them and appear on their Twitter page as one of their followers. If this happens accidentally, remember that you can always block them. Make checking out your new followers on Twitter a daily activity, then decide to follow them in return.
What’s your rule of thumb?
Peter says
Hi Narendra, this is a great blog post. From my personal experience, I think auto-following back everyone that follows you is a good strategy if one wants to get more Twitter followers and they aren’t a celebrity.
I’ve actually gained almost 50,000 Twitter followers using combination of strategies and I’m going to be sharing it on my blog next week, Lord willing. Here is a preview of what’s coming up:
http://notashamedofthegospel.com/twitter/who-else-wants-twitter-followers/
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
I’m at 6100+ followers. I miss being able to read all the updates, but adding 100+ followers a day and 2-15 email subscribers is worth it.
Paul
Peter says
You could Paul read the important updates only by adding the people you like to a list and then go through the list whenever you want. How about that?
Joanna says
I have a personal one and part responsibility for my company’s twitter feed.
For both I avoid following anyone who looks like they might be a spammer. For my personal one I’ll follow back most people who seem interesting, unless it seems like they are just bulk following to increase their own follower count. On the work one, we are mostly only follow back accounts of people/organisations within our target market. This helps keep our following numbers from running out of control. We also do try to use Twitter as one tool to keep tabs on what is happening in the field, so limiting who we follow back makes it more efficient by cutting some of the irrelevant clutter.