What should I do? Should I automatically follow back everyone who follows me? After all, it seems rude not to return the compliment. But, I use TweekDeck. I find it usedful for checking Tweeks with a quick glance. It makes a cute little noise and a small square appears telling me when a tweet’s happened. It takes seconds to check and move on.
If I followed all those people, my Tweekdeck would be bonging away like a rail crossing and I’d never get anything done. Plus, I could see at a glance that some people probably didn’t really have that much to say that I would be interested in. No offence, just not my cup of Yorkshire Tea.
Queue Yaro Starak. He hit the nail on the head today about building his Twitter following. His list is smaller than many and he wondered if he should auto-follow, but doesn’t for the same reasons I don’t. He uses Twitter like many as a marketing tool and he compared auto-following as building an un-targetted list. If you have 48 hours to spare, you can quite quickly gather a list of followers of several thousand. But will they be paying any attention to what you want to say when the only reason they’re there is to fatten up a list? I want people to follow me because they’re actually interested in what I tweet and vice versa. It’s an exchange of views, the same as any other discussion.
Yaro asks the same question as me and, like me, doesn’t have the definitive answer and it’s probably the choice of the individual. For me, I want to communicate and broadcast my new blogging and online publishing efforts to as many people as possible, but only if they’re interested. So I see some of the huge Twitter followings as just like an ‘un-targeted’ mailing list. I hope people have a ‘reason’ to follow me that’s not just because it adds one more notch to their list.
I regard Yaro’s views highly on this and that’s because as a traditional writer / photographer moving into self publishing to generate an income, his blogs have been a massive help and considerable inspiration
So what’s your thoughts?