Everyone seems to have their own criteria for working out who they will follow on Twitter.
Some follow everyone they can, others wait to be followed before they follow others, some are very selective and only follow those that they personally know, others try to keep those that they follow to a certain focused niche….
Quite a few Twitter users seem to follow anyone who follows them. This poll is simply to identify how common this practice is.
Loading ...Feel free to comment below on why you answered as you did and to share what criteria you use to determine who you follow on Twitter.
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I prefer the manual approach, as it saves me from following spammy and irrelevant profiles.
Of course not
Manual also works best for me.
Blindly following every follower will incentivize spammers to follow as many people as possible.
I check my email for new follow notifications and check out their profiles. I will follow if I like their bios and last tweets.
I like to choose myself. I often choose new folks to follow based on conversations they are having with those I already follow.
If someone follows me and their page has… Updated my blog… updated my blog Every day then NO I don’t follow.
If someone follows me that lives in CO I usually follow… figure they might know something local going on that I don’t want to miss out on.
That’s how I roll!
I spend a few minutes reviewing their activity and tweets to see the level of personal interaction with others.
I do check out their blog or website prior to deciding if I will follow or not, since I’m not at all interested in celebrity gossip and such, but I do visit their site to see if I am interested at all in possibly subscribing.
For a while I was following back everyone who followed–until I started following something like 80 people. I go one Twitter about twice a day. I’m not an addict. At 80 people, I can’t get through all the tweets when I go on twice a day, so now I’m a lot more selective. I look at their profile (are we in a similar business? do we have anything in common?) and their tweets (can I learn from this person? are they tweeting things that I can’t stand reading?) and then I decide. I’d say about half the time I decided to follow back and about half the time, I don’t.
I prefer to be selective, although I sometimes go back after a while to see whether someone I chose not to follow has suddenly given me a reason to follow based on the tweets they’re tweeting.
I always review activity of people following me, if they are worth of my interest, I star following them - otherwise, there is no point…
+1 What everyone else already said. Sometimes those with legitimate accounts talk about nothing of interest and just wouldn’t be worth following.
Like the others, I will review a page or two of their comments to see if they have said anything interesting, or if they’re interacting with others. I also look to see if they’re following anyone I know. Perhaps they have a mutual interest that’s not apparent by their most recent tweets.
I usually check every follower of mine and see if he is worth following.
Most of the followers these days are just spammers who follow thousands of members at a time and tweet a few times about their sites.
The only reason I won’t follow someone back is if they’re all spam and no community interaction or they don’t have their profile information/picture filled out. I’m not going to follow someone who’s completely anonymous (isn’t that the point of community? Having an identity and participating?) and I really don’t need to see an advertisement an hour about the same thing. Otherwise, I’ll follow.
As with most, it depends on what their feed looks like. If it’s all “thanks for the follow” or “check out the new post on my blog”, I don’t. I figure anyone who’s anyone doesn’t thank everyone for following them. That’s just silly. It’s not like they’re doing you a favor unless you’re just trying to collect followers.
I always try to keep up with all the tweets from my friends. This means I can’t follow more than around 50 people, so obviously I can’t add everybody who befriends me. But if somebody has a lot of interesting content, or appears to be a cool person in general, I usually give him/her a chance
I tend to follow only those I have something in common with. I take a look at the prospective follows website and watch their tweets for a bit before deciding to follow. Otherwise there is just too much noise and too much spam.
Great blog, thank you for all the wonderful twitips!
I like to check out the activities, interests, geographical location and conversation of a person before I consider them worth pursuing further discussion/listening. Or if they are a funny cat! Otherwise, it’s often a waste of perfectly good time.
Darren - I just opened another Twitter ID where I WOULD like to follow everyone who follows it.
@winetxt
How do I set that up?
Love how practical and helpful everything you do is!
Richard
Absolutely not. There’s only so much about social media and travel deals I can read. Add that to the fact that so many people are just adding people indiscriminately to try to boost their follower numbers and it’s just pointless. My follow and follower numbers stay fairly close. How can anyone get value out of following 2,000 people? How can you even stay abreast of all that information? It reminds me of the popularity contests on MySpace and Facebook - who can have the most “friends.”
I wait for them to follow me and if they have interesting profiles and tweets I will return the follow
I will follow everyone who follows me once I reviewed their Twitter updates history.
I prefer doing it manually because I would want discussions only that are relevant to me.
I’m a manual follower. I’ll take a look at their page to see what they tweet about, then I visit their blog and read their twitter account description. I’ve discovered some great resources and people by following those in different professions.
I don’t always follow those that follow me. But I like to check out their sites and if I can relate or just like their sites, I like to follow and find out more about them.
I’m not totally biz-centric on Twitter and I’ll tweet about a variety of things. I like the variety of Twitter. I’ve learned alot (biz & otherwise) from people that I have followed.
Twitter IS Kool!
I don’t automatically follow people who follow me on my personal Twitter ID. I review tweets and try to stick with my niche. or actually niches…
I go back and forth on whether to automatically follow for corporate accounts I manage. I notice a lot of corporations do use auto follow..wish you had asked this second question, Darren…should businesses auto follow?
When I have new followers, I always look at their Twitter page first then their websites. If I like their tweets, then I follow them. If I can’t relate to their tweets or find anything useful in their tweets, I don’t follow them.
If I like their websites and find it interesting enough, I also follow them. Sometimes Twitter works like my feed reader (which I sometimes forget to check) in that it updates me when someone has a new post.
I check out their profile, and blog or website if they have linked to one, to see if we are likely to have anything in common. I do follow most people though. The only people I have ignored have been really spammy, or a bit weird.
I voted no as in I do not have a system to automatically follows those that follow me. I manually follow everyone who follows me.
I do it manually too and no I don’t follow everyone that follows me. I look for those that I might have a connection with, those that are in my niche and those that I would be happy to learn from.
For the most part, I choose to follow people who have something to say besides: “Buy this,” or “Check out this website.” I want to connect with people, not web sites or products.
If your updates tell me who you are, make me think, touch my heart or make me laugh, I am likely to follow you. If you are strictly marketing, and not injecting yourself into your conversations, I’m not interested.
I am insatiably curious, so I like following a variety of people. It means I can’t always be on top of everybody’s updates, but it makes for interesting reading when I do sign on.
with all the spammer’s and bots around at the moment, I prefer to choose myself.
I don’t automatically follow everyone, but I’ve considered it to be polite, however, I don’t have that many followers, so it’s not a big hassle, and I notice that some of my follows are bots/spammish, so I wouldn’t follow them anyways.
I follow back *most* people but don’t follow when they have a stream of the same link or are only doing automatic posts from their blog. If I don’t follow someone, I’ll check them out in a week or two when I clean things up. If they are getting the hang of Twitter and contributing then I’ll follow them back.
I would like to follow everyone but I can’t justify having too many tweets each day with content that I’m not interested in. I’ll usually look at the person’s twitter content before deciding, not automatically.
I try to follow everyone that follows me… but if we have no shared interests or they seem to using it purely to advertise things I am not interested in… then I don’t
I refollow who follows me when they arouse my interest, otherwise i don’t.
I think this Poll will be a little skewed. If you’re reading Twitter Tips by Darren Rowse, you’re probably a blogger or business owner. By default, we bloggers and business owners focus on value, so we would be less likely to follow everyone who follows us.
However, Twitter isn’t just for business owners. It has regular people talking about regular things. These people include, the Myspace Friend Addicts who added anyone and everyone as a friend to brag about their friend count. You probably remember this frenzy a few years ago…
So, depending on what demographic you’re speaking to, the answer to this poll is likely to change.
What do you think?
No, at the moment, I intentionally manually follow back only after checking four things:
(1) what’s in their profile? does it list a real website (and not just a sales copy page); do they list the state they’re from, and/or do they have a thoughtful description;
(2) is their latest page (or two) of Tweets interesting to me ?
(3) is their Followers to Following ratio overly skewed? (do they only have a few followers yet they follow close to the 2,000 max limit); and
(4) have they Tweeted recently? (at least once within the latest week).
It’s actually a rather quick process to know if it’s someone of interest to me or not.
I follow people if they don’t seem like spammers, or if they seem to be related to my niche. Sometimes, I forget to follow back, however. Oops
However, I do check if their site seems legit, and how often they tweet. If it is only blog updates, and nothing else, I tend not to follow.
I don’t automatically follow people who follow me for precisely the same reasons as those stated above. That goes for all online services I use.
I’m all about careful screening. These days, twitter usernames themselves are often a dead giveaway for spam. Nonetheless I will always check out their bio, website and/or recent tweets to gauge whether I want to follow.
Biggest pet peeves: People with no bio, or bio that tells me exactly nothing about who they are and what they do. Cutesy, ambiguous phrases = no follow.
I don’t automatically follow people who follow me. I tend to follow two criteria:
1. I follow those that seem to be mostly tweeting about a subject that interests me, hence I follow a lot of other TV bloggers.
2. I follow some of the followers that follow me and then @ me with comments about what I’ve tweeted or answer questions that I’ve posed, etc.
I have actually waffled on this one. For a while, I was following everyone who followed me, to a point where I signed up for a service to do the auto-follow. After getting annoyed by spam tweets, I have since unsub’ed from the service and have gone back to the manual method.
By doing it manually, I get a chance to screen, but also send out a DM thanking the person for the follow.
I will follow back people I think look interesting to me, and who I think I can enter in some kind of relevant conversation with me in Twitter terms. I don’t follow back people who clearly have nothing in common with me. I rarely un-follow, if I do so it’s because someone is being a douche
too many spam followers out there - I always manually check - as long as I see some historical tweets between them and other people i know/follow I will follow.
I agree with the @Helen approach on this one. I’m very interested in hearing why folks would answer this question as “yes.” To me, that seems like you are missing the point of twitter. Wait…there is a point of twitter? Just playing….
dj
I follow for a bit, but if someone is spending the day tweeting about their temperature of their coffee and what they’re eating for lunch — without anything else — I usually stop following. I like the personal stuff, but not if that’s all there is. I like to get — and give — good information.
I will also “unfollow” someone if I reply to them, or ask them a question directly and they do not answer. Did it last night.
It was actually a liberating experience!
About 80%, but too many spammers or those that haven’t learned yet that Twitter is not a blatant advertising site to automatically approve.
Jeff
Right now I am new, so I usually add them automatically, after I’ve read their page. So far I haven’t seen anything I hate or too spammy. I have done searches looking for people in my niche though, and followed them, to start.
I agree with @mcmilker though - “wish you had asked this second question, Darren… should businesses auto follow?”
I’m not so worried about having big ‘follow’ numbers, so NO, I don’t automatically follow anyone who follows me. Like many, first I check out their Tweets, read their bio, and if they’ve expressed an interest in something I’m interested, I’ll give them a go. If I find their tweets annoying or too boring - I’ve got no qualms about un-following them. Twitter is entertainment for me, life’s too short for senseless tweets!
Manual follow.
When I recieve the notify-email, I will check out their twitter page for no-goes like stupid selfmarketing, spam-twitters or just nothing interesting. Otherwise I am happy to follow people all around the world
Generally speaking I mostly follow those who follow me, it’s only fair. There are occasions when I don’t follow them, like when it’s obvious that they’re just advertising things. I would have voted in this poll, but you haven’t included a “mostly” option!
I’m selective, in that I check out people who choose to follow me before deciding whether to follow back. I don’t understand how people who follow hundreds of other folk can make any sense of the resulting flood. I find that following just a few dozen people gives me more than enough to cope with!
Funnily enough, I was just writing a post for 140char when this appeared in Google Reader, and my topic was on the fact I’m not reciprocating follows because people don’t supply any information about who they are or what they do for me to make a judgement on.
Particularly frustrating are people with protected updates who follow me - how on earth am I meant to guess whether or not to request to follow them. I could automatically respond, and then remove them later if they’re not of interest, but it turns into more work than I’d like!
I basically follow Helen’s rules, posted above, in general…
I follow pretty much everyone who follows me. But I unfollow if they turn out to be uninteresting/obnoxious.
I’m all about following people who add value to my twitter time. If I get a mention or two, I might go check out their profile. I’m suffering from information overload as it is!
In the beginning of my twitter-life, I did. I followed everyone that followed me. Since then my twittter-verse has developed. I now review what there activities are like, see if we have common followers/friends. See why they are on twitter, and so on.
I think there is such a thing as following too many.
When the email comes in that I’m being followed, I check the bio and website. It’s usually easy to see who is just trying to sell me something. And what’s with those “I’m playing with my FREE laptop” deals?
To follow or not to follow…followers? I use the rear view mirror method. I take the time to see who is following, if they update and thus participate, if what they tweet or blog is of interest and frankly if they are a real and authentic human tweet and not a corporate pr/ad machine. Yes, I look at profile, websites, twitter content, frequency of updates and then read between the lines to see if this stranger following my “what I am doing” conversation does more than just lurk or just sell. I look to see if they for real, honest, friendly and perhaps working to make a difference with social media and hopefully have a sense of humor. Like anything else in life, to follow or not to follow followers is a choice. Thank you Twitter for the option.
No, But I do always thank them for following me. I also automatically follow people who post keywords that interest me, such as marketing, new media, advertising, seovice and so on…
I talk about this in Episode 16 of SeoVice: TOP 5 TWITTER TIPS.
http://www.seovice.com
Back in the day maybe, but since ‘Bill the Blogger is now following you’ became common place in my inbox this changed.
While I don’t auto follow everyone who follows me, I do at least auto-send a direct message back to them thanking them for following me by using Tweetlater. It’s a nice tool for getting in touch with fellow Tweeters. I always insist on checking out followers first before following them.
I follow if there is a shared interest or the follower seems particularly interesting or even if it’s obvious that the follower isn’t spamming. There are too many spammers to just follow everyone, though.
Oh, I probably committed a Mortal Sin with Twitter. If I couldn’t figure out why people were Following me, I’d Block them.
Then I discovered Qwitter, which showed me such people will leave without such, uh, encouragement.
I don’t auto Follow back. People have to have something in their tweets that interests me for my blog or be generally interesting.
I still Block: But only those accounts that have already been Suspended by Twitter. This keep my Follower count honest.
I usually manually follow those who are following me. When after viewing their tweets for awhile I find a pattern of content that’s either boring or unacceptable I stop following them. Right now it’s not a problem to follow everyone because not many people are following me.
I generally watch who people I already follow are conversing with. If the convo seems relevant to what I’m interested in, I’ll dig deeper. Also, when I’m notified of new followers, I’ll dig deeper. Here’s my “workflow,” you could call it, for choosing followers and it goes relatively quickly:
1. Check the Follow vs. Follower ratio–these numbers can automatically give you a feel for how they use twitter. If they’re following only a handful of people with a ton of followers, it generally shows that they’re only there to post–not to converse (not always a bad thing though). If they follow a ton, with only a handful of followers, chances are they’re spamming. I’ve found a good balance is when they follow a good number of people, but a smaller number than are following them; it’s a good indication that their tweets are worthwhile and they know how to join the conversation.
2. What’s their sidebar say they do? People tend to tweet about what they know or love, and it’s those topics that I’m looking for, such as graphic/web design stuff. If I don’t like what I see on step 1 or 2, I’ll throw in the towel.
3. General scan of their tweets. Is it mostly personal stuff? Do they share a lot of links? Are they replying or retweeting often? Is it all self-promotion, or “I could use a Digg or StumbleUpon” requests? (Personally, if it’s worth the diggs or stumbles, then you won’t have to ask people to do it).
4. Finally, I’ll check out the link to their website to get a better feel of who they are and what they do.
I’ll check out the profile of anyone who decides to follow me. If they share similar interests and regularly Twitter in an interesting way, then I’ll probably follow them.
There was just a huge conversation about this on a blog site yesterday. The conversation initially was about the Gurus not following all who follow them. The owner twittered the fact that things had gotten personal. It was interesting to see the responses as there appears to be no middle ground with this and people were VERY passionate in their responses.
I clicked “Yes” to the poll, but that’s not entirely accurate. If they are obviously just a business marketing twitterer then most likely I will not return the follow, especially if their ratios are too out of whack.
Cheers
George
I generally only add people I know, which means people I physically know in real life, people whose blog I read, or people I’ve met randomly online via Plurk, Facebook, Diigo, etc. I’ve also added some news tweets (NYT, CNN, MarchOf Dimes), so the stream I have to read over is pretty full. I wish I could separate news and personal tweets. Ah, this is what I want: The ability to categorize the people I’m following, and then view them by category. I would definitely follow more people if I had this option.
Even though I enjoy people following me, that doesn’t mean I have to follow them aswell.
The only people I follow are people that link out to valuable places and people I can learn from.
Not only do I carefully choose which new followers to follow back, and block spammy followers, I also unfollow folks who tweet too many replies that mean nothing to anyone but the @ recipient. Come on folks, either make it relevant to many, or use the D function!
I follow people by hand because I want to follow people that talk about things that I find interesting. If I just added everyone that added me, then I’d be following people that don’t talk about things I’m interested in, and the value of Twitter would decrease for me. By manually following, Twitter stays valuable, and I’m more inclined to continue actively using it.
I follow most people who follow me. Often this is because they have worthwhile content. Sometimes this is out of courtesy. If they twit too much they have to have exceptional content or I’ll stop following.
I return the favor of following unless the new follower is a spammer.
I usually look to see what sort of thing they are twittering about and how often they twitter. I don;t want to follow people who are only using twitter to self promote or tweet 16 times an hour about nothing interesting.
I definitely look at a person’s most recent tweets before choosing to follow them - if all of their posts are about sports or if I think they’re just trying to sell me something, I don’t follow them. I think it’s important to keep the dialogue relevant.
I don’t automatically follow everyone. But as long as it isn’t a brand new account I generally follow them back. My pet peeve is following someone then them not following you back. But that is ok because if they don’t follow me back in a few days I stop following them.
I guess I really don’t use Twitter enough to know the ins and outs but if I follow someone and they do not follow me. Then I make a reply to them will they actually see it?
I am very selected. I usually won’t follow people who are following more than 100 others as I think that is too many to have a meaningful conversation with. I also won’t follow anyone who’s last 5 posts are pimping their own blog posts, who have less than a page of content, or who haven’t written anything that seems relevant to me.
I am much more likely to follow people that are local to me.
I check out their tweets first. To avoid spam. But generally, following the tips I ave seen I follow those who follow me.
Just ditto-ing Helen above. That’s about the system I follow, although I only check about once a week and look at all new followers at the same time. That has the effect of giving those who are just following me to get me to follow them time to go away.
I find I’m much more likely to follow people that I have sought out than ever anyone who follows me first. (Unless I know them and that’s how I discover they’re on Twitter at all.) I regularly conduct searches on topics I care about, looking for new people to follow who are talking about what I want to know. I don’t find much value in taking a passive approach in who to follow.
My system is much like Karsten’s. When I get the notification email I check the person’s profile, last tweets, and their website if they have one. But as long as there isn’t an empty profile or the person isn’t a spammer or bot I will almost always follow back. I used to me more selective but I’ve found that I was missing out on a lot of interesting people. They might not have the same interests but I’m learning from almost all of them.
Hi!
I refollow the Peeps who follows me ..
for both interests
O no?
ciao from italy
I do on my branded, blog-related account, but not my personal account, where I greatly limit the number of people I follow.
Although I voted yes, I do examine the account to make sure it’s not spammy.
9 times out of ten, though, I do add the people who add me.
I follow most people who follow me. Sometimes I won’t follow, but usually I will
I like to see who they are and what the “represent”. Is that person active on Twitter, what are they writing about, what are their beliefs, etc. I want to see if I can build a relationship with that person.
I tend to get followed by a lot of accounts that are purely just RSS bots, or are using Twitter as an attempt to promote their site rather as a community. For that reason, I tend to manually follow back people who follow me; but that said I still try to follow as many worthwhile people as I can.
I initially follow nearly everyone who follows me after a quick review of their profile. If they seem legit, I follow back.
I’m quick to unfollow though. If someone seems out of touch with what I like to talk about or just uninteresting, I unfollow. What I now HATE is qwitter. Next person who bitches about being unfollowed is getting a virtual throat punch. It’s not personal, I just don’t care to hear what you have to say.
Well, maybe it is personal. I don’t get upset when people unfollow me.
Like others say, I review their activity and blog. It it sounds interesting I will go ahead and follow them as well. Maybe there will be new interesting conversations I can follow/join.
On the same token, that is the same reason I don’t believe everyone I follow should follow me back. Perhaps what they find interesting is different than what I do.
I prefer to choose myself. I usually look to see what sort of thing they are twittering about.
I look at their Twitter page to see what they tweet about. I follow their links to see if their content is relevant to me. If it is, I follow them.
Well twitter is about popularity and following and Interaction. When someone with 20 followers follows me, I respect him as much as bigger follower like Joelcomm. People are all the same. I give him or her the same courtesy as they gave me.
I donot follow Gurus and other one way hogs who do have 10K followers and are only following 300 others. That is a not my style.
Most of the time I will check out a followers last page of posts and any attached weblinks. If there is too much personal stuff, like a minute by minute update on their life then I usually will not follow. I like to see a nice looking website that isn’t just about selling to me and somebody I can relate to or share information with. I also tend to avoid people following 2000 or more unless they have a Great ratio or exceptional first impressions.
I definitely avoid the spammers, but I also check out the site that they link.
I follow contributors to a biz/tech/web 2.0 conversation..not big on those who only tweet personal stuff or r obviously trying to win traffic to their latest blog/website update because u can’t find their blog/websitein the top 10 a G.com for a related search..I could care less, esp what they had for a meal etc, inspirational quotes are extremely annoying, only have to look at my calender to find those..if I needed them i.e. IMarketers who cross-promote one another’s launches are very annoying/waste of space IMHO. e.g. Stompernet2 promo/offering turned out to be a box full of discs full of 2006 info..all out of date, and much worse once I was inside…supported by the spam technique ‘article spinning’ to drive tacky IM squeeze pages into top searches because adwords burned them, and rightly so. To their credit they did refund my $$. Darren u r one of the exceptions..most posts offer value/edu/informative
Sounds a bit snobby but I don’t follow everyone who follows me. I do check out the profile of those who do follow me to see who they are and what they do along with reading some of their Twitter messages.
If I feel they have something to say in their Twitter messages, then I’ll follow them. But if they just post silly or non-informational messages, then I don’t.
Wesley
The Geek Entrepreneur
No. It doesn’t seem personal when you auto follow.
Not really,I rather not have a spammy twit acct.
I did an experiment on this very issue, I found that less active memebers would follow whoever followed them. Also if their username declared themselves i.e sample @ilovefords and your name also related to that topic i.e sample @falconsrule they would also follow.
I automatically refollow all legit twitter users but when companies/websites/spam refollow me I consider the value of the content before refollowing.