Building your Twitter account - should you 'follow back'?

muchacho · Jan 15, 2011

I've got a few Twitter accounts and whilst I'm following people and unfollowing 1-2 days later if they haven't followed back, I'm thinking, should we be following people who followed us first?

At the moment I'm using Tweet Adder and have it set to automatically follow back, but surely people who are following me first are doing so as they are interested in whatever theme the Twitter account is being used for. If you don't follow those people back it means you can have a larger threshold to be following and unfollowing.

Thoughts?

Lionman · Jan 17, 2011

If you don't want loose your followers I suggest to follow back.

cro-mag · Jan 17, 2011

I agree to lionman, It`s a matter of time until they will stop following you if you don`t follow them back

Autumn · Jan 17, 2011

I personally don't follow back.

My reasoning is that you only have a certain proportion of people you can follow. If you're doing straight spam accounts, then the people who follow you out of the blue are probably just other marketers, who are following you because they scraped someone else's followers list or scraped you from the search. Those "free" follows then enable you to follow a few more targeted people, who might follow you back. So you're trading an untargeted follower who is probably another spammer for the potential to get some more targeted followers.

muchacho · Jan 17, 2011

Autumn said:
I personally don't follow back.

My reasoning is that you only have a certain proportion of people you can follow. If you're doing straight spam accounts, then the people who follow you out of the blue are probably just other marketers, who are following you because they scraped someone else's followers list or scraped you from the search. Those "free" follows then enable you to follow a few more targeted people, who might follow you back. So you're trading an untargeted follower who is probably another spammer for the potential to get some more targeted followers.

That's my thinking mate.

Also, one thing to bare in mind - you'll get other people who use software and they'll be following me automatically.
If I don't follow back they will unfollow, which is good as they have no real interest in me.

But surely Twitter is about people following because they are interested in the subject? There should never be a need to follow back unless that's their aim - to gain followers.

At the moment I'm not following back.

Building your Twitter account - should you 'follow back'?

muchacho

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