I was reading, Darren Rowse’s blog, TwiTip.com, and came across an article that struck a chord with me. It was written by Skellie of Skelliewag.org.
The article is called How to Follow Everyone Back on Twitter Without Ruining Your Experience.
Skellie suggested that you follow everyone who follows you in order to grow your number of followers. She admitted that once she began “returning the follow”, her follower rate increased.
Then she goes on to explain how you can use various tools like TweetDeck (which I love!) to group/filter the people you’re following. In other words, put the people you are REALLY interested in in one group and the “others” in another group.
I interpreted that “other” group as people you really don’t care as much about, but you are mainly following them because they followed you.
Now, in Skellie’s defense, she DID mention that you will get the opportunity to meet new and interesting people with this approach, so she wasn’t just saying to use this technique for the sake of growing your followers.
But if I’m just going to filter most of them out into the “other” group with TweetDeck, what’s the point of following them if I probably won’t read most of their tweets anyway? Over time, that “other” group could get massive!
Now, maybe some people who use this “follow all” strategy actually do read most of the tweets and if that’s the case, that’s great (and amazing). It just doesn’t seem very useful to follow hundreds or even thousands of people whose tweets may not interest me.
Of course, I understand the importance and advantages of having a large following, but it just seems a bit disingenuous to follow people I’m going to basically filter (ignore) to potentially boost my own following.
I’ve read about a lot of people doing this (not just Skellie). I guess everyone has their own Twitter habits and tolerance. (Mine must be pretty low.) 😉
I am just not interested in following an obscene number of people with the main goal to boost my own follower count. Also, I hope that people follow me because they value my tweets instead of just hoping I’ll follow them in return.
Actually, I turned off the “new follower email notification” that Twitter sends out because the emails were clogging up my inbox. The downside to doing that is I could be missing out on interesting people to follow. (Not to mention I didn’t even know my mom was following me! Oops.) 😉
So I may turn that notification back on to stay in the loop and return more follows to people who tweet about things that interest me. But as far as Skellie’s “return all follow” strategy goes, I doubt I’ll be using it.
What do you think? Do you return all follows?
No I do not follow all that follow me, because some blogs we may have little in common. So really it is a wasted of both of our time. Yes, I want followers, but I want them because they genuinely want to follow. I do not want them because we are playing a numbers game. There are some blogs I may follow and they do not follow me, but I have a geniune interest in their blog. That is okay.
I agree I decided not to take that route. But recently twitter has installed a feature called ” lists”. This makes it easier to have massive followers.
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I organized my TweetDeck today and I love it! Now that I have a couple months of Twitter experience under my belt I’m learning how to use it to my advantage.
I will follow anyone that is in a field of my interest in order to see who they follow and followers are. So far I’ve had 95% in my area of interest.
I have had to block a few folks that only have porn links or related material. IMO they only follow you so folks will find them.
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I couldn’t agree with you more! What good is it even doing the person you’re following if you really don’t care about what they’ve got to say? Maybe if she thought perhaps, about the people that are just following her just for the sake of having their picture display on her home page to increase their own exposure? It really is very pretentious to do such a thing. I try to only return the follow of the people whose profile really interest me and let the rest do what they like. If my following doesn’t increase because of it, that’s fine with me.
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I am still a little puzzled by the whole Twitter buzz that is taking place. I think it’s going to fade out someday as quickly as it has risen.
I added a couple of musicians the other day to follow and piles of musicians are following me now.
I have a couple of hundred total strangers who are seeing my short blurbs. No one ever responds unless they are selling something and want my business.
What is the benifit other than the possibility of someone clicking on a link that I may have posted.
I’m beginning to view the website as a huge spam market and I do not like spam.
It’s a place to develop shallow relationships through short and shallow posts.
Jordy, I have to disagree. Most of my replies on Twitter are not spam. They are people thanking me or asking me questions and the questions allow me to educate and/or promote relevant links to my site. So I think it depends on how you use it.
I use it to announce new things I’m doing on my site, recommend helpful articles and my blog posts and it’s opened up a channel for me to promote and educate. If you tweet about things that are useful to people, then it is another way to promote your own personal brand. I love the space. I think it depends on your niche, how you use it, etc.
When I first started tweeting I didn’t get many replies either. But now that I’ve learned what people respond to, I’m getting much better results. It’s about finding the right mix of tweeting that works for you.
I do have a “favourites” column in TweetDeck and an “All Tweets” column. I try to keep on top of what is going on in my favourites column even as I work on other things. It isn’t realistic for me to do that with my “All Tweets” column. I would get nothing done other than twitter otherwise.
However, when I do take time to just hang out on twitter, then I follow the All Tweets column and try to reply to and interact with people that I wouldn’t otherwise. And if they engage back and are interesting, they may migrate to my favourites column.
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I want conversation from my Twitter, so know I don’t auto follow and yes, I have turned off notifications. I follow people when they say something interesting or when I’m @tted and it gets my attention. I see no value in following just to follow. To my eyes that is an entirely empty metric.
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No, I don’t return all follows. When I get the email notification that someone is following me I always click the link to check them out to see if they’re tweeting about stuff that I might find interesting. I look at their bio but I also read a dozen or so of their recent tweets to get a sense of their style. Then I decide to follow or not. I’ve discovered some awesome folks to follow who expose me to amazing things I wouldn’t have found on my own.. btw, I’m at http://www.twitter.com/firstthird if anyone wants to try me out.
Great work so for.
I have actively begun following people that I deem as relevant and that can add value to my business. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed for the most part that people that follow me typically fall within the same market.
I’ve noticed an increase in traffic back to my site because of clicks of my blog posts within Twitter, clicks from my profile and an increase in ReTweets.
If the follower is way off I will not reciprocate the follow to balloon my numbers.
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Never even looked at it. Maybe I should because there are a few people whom I really feel that I should follow. Lisa obviously and a few other marketers who to me seem genuine and offer good value. Having said that all those people whom I follow have RSS feeds which I’ve placed on my iGoogle desktop so I generally get new stuff when posted. So is there any reason to have a twitter account and get messages all day long or am I missing something. Is there any benefit such as back links via twitter or is it just a social time-waster? Please feel free to correct me if I have missed the point. 🙂
I think people focus too much on following/followers, it shouldn’t be all about the numbers
I check my account every now and again and go through my new followers, I follow any that seem interesting and I dont filter my tweets, I have met some great people by doing this, often unexpectedly I will come across an interesting tweet by a new follower and I make an effort to engage with them.
I also use search at times to find new twitterers, and follow anyone that seems active and interesting, I dont care if they follow back.
I don’t really understand others policies, there is an unfollow button, if I follow someone and they just tweet spam or constant quotes (which are annoying) I simply unfollow.
Overall I like to have a mix in my tweet stream, I check in and read through the recent tweets, personal tweets and links, I dont mind either as long as they are not blatent self promotion or pure sales hype.
Hi Lisa,
I beg to differ regarding following everyone who is following you. Firstly, its the courteous issue. Secondly, there is no harm in getting message that you don’t read everyday but someday, some message may be relevant to you when you need it. If the Direct Message becomes too annoying, then you un-follow that person by all means.
I am also pretty annoyed when someone Auto-Tweets using Tweetlater ( I guess ) and the message is nothing but AFFILIATE MARKETING STUFFS ! I will surely say Sayonara to him.
Sometimes, I get to read information which I am looking for sub-consciously, and it came from the Communities whom I rarely read which I am sure is vice versa when you tweet your messages too.
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison” but I know one thing, I get to find the Newbies or Computer Beginners who is looking for answers to their problems and I am glad because I choose to follow all these people who has followers themselves.
Just my humble opinion ! Cheers !
William
I saw that article and questioned how it could not lead to utter choas, with or without tweet deck. I only add a few follows at a time and agree that a desire to read tweets is a top criteria. If someone has a business in my niche, that’s also a big one for me. Thanks for sharing your reaction.
Hi lisa. i Think everyone has they own opinion. For me, if you plan to filter some of your follower, that going to waste your time. There is no point to follow them if you just want to grow and show off your follower number.
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I’m taking a totally different route. I have the Twitter account but never ever use it. I regularly get new followers but I am not adding any people to my list to follow and I believe that I have written a total of 3 tweets in the last 8 months.
To me Twitter is about as much waste of time as MSN Messenger and Facebook.
I understand that you can use it in a constructive and productive manor but 99.999% don’t. 😀
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Thanks for getting me to think about my own Twitter follow ‘policy’. I don’t follow automatically but do take a look at all profiles & websites of new followers. If there’s a fit, in area of business or interests, I usually follow back. Something that puts me off is if they’re too noisy & tweet every few minutes!
The number of followers is less important than meeting interesting new people. From time to time I also make the effort to find new people to follow. It has to work both ways.
A Spamollower or Spam Follower. Or one of those people who has a ton of facebook/myspace friends because they add everyone they see. Trust, it won’t benefit you in the long run. People follow people because of what they are saying and how many people are following them. Not because of how many people you are following.
So, the argument that you’ll end up with more followers isn’t logical. You only follow who follows you, so, its kind of pointless to follow them because they are already following you; defeating the purpose of getting more people to follow you…because they already are. And if they aren’t yet, its not going to be because you are following their friend.
IDK, the only valid argument for following everyone is that you will possibly meet people. And that is possible, a huge MAYBE meet people if you decide to engage in conversation with them…and the odds of that are slim to none.
So, it is not worth it…a complete waste of time.
I dont return all follows because its pointless. If they started to converse with me, then of course Ill follow!
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Hey great article. Been thinking about this a lot lately. While it’s always nice to return the favor and follow someone , in my opinion it shouldn’t be done unless you’re truly going to read what they write. I love the fact that you’re being real and sticking up for what you believe in even though it could* hurt your followers. I emphasize “could” here because to be quite honest it doesn’t matter if you follow me on twitter or not , I follow you because I like the work you do and want to stay updated. Anyways keep up the great work , & make some more videos !!!
Whoo! First again. 😉 I agree. What’s the point of following people if you’re going to ignore most?