Why, How and Who Do You Follow on Twitter?

Why, How and Who Do You Follow?

A Deeper Dive into Twitter Follow Strategies

Maybe not everyone would call the choice to click follow or unfollow a “strategy,” but when you click that button, it’s a conscious choice. Even setting up one of those awful auto-DM services is a conscious choice, and I would thereby suggest, a strategy.

“It’s not about the numbers.”

Baloney, I say. While I may not care how many followers I have, I do care who I follow. And I can’t help but notice their numbers. Who of us doesn’t look at a person’s “numbers” when reviewing his/her twitter profile. (Auto-DMers excluded, of course.)

Here are a few follow strategies I’ve identified in my twitter travels…

THE AUTO-FOLLOW STRATEGY

APPLICATION: You have 10,000 followers and the number grows every day. No way you could respond personally. It just doesn’t scale.

PROS: Time-efficient

CONS: Impersonal

TOOLS: Socialtoo.com

THE EVEN-STEVEN FOLLOW STRATEGY

APPLICATION: A) You feel that if people follow you, you’d like to follow back, but you’d first like to (manually) view their twitter profiles to determine if the mutual follow will be mutually beneficial. AND/OR, B) you want to follow people ONLY if they follow you back and you (may or may not) want to automate that process.

PROS: A) Improves the quality of your personal twitter community and offers the opportunity to send a personal Thank You DM, which can lead to some great extended conversations; B) Nice even numbers, process can be automated

CONS: A) Time-consuming if manual; B) Questionable quality if automated

TOOLS: A) You and your computer; B) Socialtoo.com

THE DOUBLE TAKE FOLLOW STRATEGY

APPLICATION: I had at first suspected hubris until I inquired further on this one. Turns out that some people whose numbers are heavy on the followers side and light on the follow side only follow back people who @, DM or RT them. So you can get their attention, and they may be more than willing to follow back or connect via email, but it’s a 2-step outreach for you either way.

PROS: Time-efficient

CONS: One-sided

TOOLS: With @, DM and RT alerts via tweetdeck or email alerts via tweetbeep you get a ping when you are mentioned

THE UNEQUIVOCALLY UNRECIPROCATED FOLLOW STRATEGY

APPLICATION: UberTwitterati and VIPs want to provide you with their insights but have no interest in following just anyone. That is, why follow? Why not lead? (It’s all the rage, these days.)

PROS: A very uncrowded twitter stream

CONS: A very unrequited exchange

TOOLS: Unecessary

THE RANDOM FOLLOW STRATEGY

APPLICATION: Spam.

PROS: None

CONS: Bad Karma

TOOLS: The people who do this

Those are my observations. Personally, I opt for balance in my follow strategy. I still look for quality new people to follow and if someone follows me, I still manually check every twitter profile before I follow back. If I choose not to follow someone back, then I would find it more than reasonable for that person to stop following me, if they so choose. I’m in this for the give and take. I am as delighted to Retweet as I am to be Retweeted. I realize that I’m not going to have regular conversations with every single person in my twitter community, but I know they’re there because we have something in common and the door to direct two-way communication remains wide open…just like in real life.

So what’s your twitter follow strategy? What are the pros and cons you face? What tools do you use to make it all work?

Just don’t tell me you don’t look at the numbers. Because I’m not buyin’ it. The numbers count. And it should be clear by now that I’m not talking about quantity.

Tags: Follow, TwitterSmart, Unfollow

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 1:34 am and is filed under TwitterSmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Why, How and Who Do You Follow?”

Charity Hisle Says:
February 11th, 2009 at 8:12 am
This was fun to read! I’m so glad you cleared away those tumble weeds! For the record, I’m Even-Steven, nice to meet you!
Chris Atwood Says:
February 11th, 2009 at 10:01 am
I like the “Even Steven” method, although I’m not super strict about it. I follow people who I find interesting. I want to know more about them. In most cases, I get a follow-back from them.

When responding to a follow, I manually check their page and see if their content is something I would EVER want to see. Most of the time it’s interesting, useful or at least funny (depending on the level of use e.g. personal, quasi-business, business, power, twitterati), but sometimes it’s not. If it’s not, I don’t follow back. It’s their prerogative to unfollow me or not.

I also go on, switch to private, block spammers who have followed me (who I really don’t even want my content associated with so they can have a bigger twitter ego), and then go back to public. It messes with my ratio a little bit, my followers go down, but I try and keep my stream with only people I actually want to read about.
Tom Smith Says:
February 16th, 2009 at 3:57 am
You missed an important one… THE FOLLOW INTERESTING PEOPLE STRATEGY… (regardless of whether they’ll follow you).

When people follow me I check out what they’ve written recently (if I don’t know them personally) and see what they’ve been tweeting. Anyone with more than 50% @replies isn’t really worth following in my opinion. I know that this might be classed as the RANDOM STRATEGY because someone might have just been having a bad-tweet day but it works for me.

I’ve been thinking about this too…
http://www.theotherblog.com/Articles/2009/02/09/twitter-problems/
minutemaker Says:
February 17th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Hey Tom,
Thanks for stopping by. While I did mention in my closing that “I still look for quality new people to follow…” I did not elaborate, and you are right that taking the time to find interesting people is essential to any follow strategy.
Checked out your blog. Working on a comment to post there.
Look forward to speaking with you further.
-R
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