Internet Gangsters Tycoons in Training

Twitter: To Follow or Not To Follow

Twitter has become an essential part of social marketing these days and you are starting to find more and more businesses utilizing this new technology as a way to connect with their clients or demographic, but with this sudden influx of users comes a question…. Do you follow people that follow you?

When I first signed up for twitter early last year I obviously didn’t have many followers, but with the apps available on the iPhone, I was able to see and interact with people within a certain amount of miles of me, which helped a lot when we went on our baseball roadtrip last year and didn’t know good places to eat, etc. But I started noticing that whenever I would follow someone, they would immediately follow me back. It was nice, because then I knew people were actually getting my tweets, whether or not they were reading them is a different story. So I decided to give this idea a try and setup a few Twitter accounts for some of my web sites, then I used the search function and searched people’s profiles looking for related keywords or interests and then I would proceed to follow them in hopes that they would follow me back. 

And yes it did work. I quickly had a couple hundred followers for some of my websites which I would then feed links to trying to get people to visit the site. After a while though I stopped using this method because it seemed to me that people who were just following me because I follow them are probably going to be less inclined to click my links than the people that actually made an effort to follow me, plus now I was following an obscene amount of people and couldn’t interact with all of them. 

That was then…. it seems like things have started to change in the Twitter-verse. Not as many people are following people that are following them. It could just be the influx of celebrities joining Twitter and obviously they can’t follow everyone that follows them, but I know personally I don’t follow everyone that is following me. I just feel like if you want to know what’s going on with me, that’s great, I appreciate it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to know what’s going on with you. It’s not that I think I’m any more interesting than the next guy (cause I’m definitely not, just take a look at my tweets @treding) it’s just that I like being able to communicate with the people I follow and I truely do want to know what’s going on with them. So if I had thousands of tweets coming up everytime I opened Tweetie on my iPhone, I would probably miss 90% of my actual friends’ tweets. Yes there are apps for the computer that help with this problem by allowing you to create groups so you can keep people apart and I do use TweetDeck at home for this very reason, but I’m not always at home so people like Ashton Kutcher and P Diddy are constantly flooding my Tweetie screen making it very likely that I missed some stuff that my actual friends are saying that might interest me. 

So with that I’m asking this question, Do you follow everyone that follows you (as long as they aren’t spammers of course)? Or are you like me where it’s great that people are following you and want to know what you’re up to, but you don’t really care what they are doing so there’s no reason to follow them? 

I think Twitter is moving away from the follow me follow you idea from a year ago, but what do you guys think? And feel free to post your Twitter names below if you’re looking for random followers.