One thing though, the people who aren’t on twitter will just be linked to the twitter main window right and not your profile page? Does that matter seeing as though they don’t have twitter accounts?

Luckily I Reserved my real name for building some real relationships and started using that account far more often.
No auto-DMs, no auto-follows, no noise, just real conversations with people that I want to talk with.

Thanks a lot

Also, I have two twitter accounts. One is personal and the other is for my business, and I think about them very differently. With my personal account, I could care less about how many followers I have. I use that account to learn about things all day. My business account is very different though, I want as many followers as possible because I want to spread the word. I am trying something out that I would love to get your opinions on. I want my business account to be very conversational, so I am reaching out to a lot of people using Twitter Search, but I am only following the people who respond to me because I don’t want to be spammy. What do you think of this approach?

Rarely does anyone say what they mean out of fear of hurting someone’s feeling and sounding like an ass or worse sounding pretentious. The greatest hope of the web was it gave people a place they could safely say what they mean. By squandering that opportunity with euphemistic cry me a river of politically correct psycho babble you disrespect anyone who has ever stood up for the rights of people to speak their minds. There is nothing wrong with saying I want followers, say it proudly.

Furthermore if you want to disagree with me say it proudly. If you think I’m an ass and want to tell me to got F myself, say it. If you want me to follow you on twitter, say it. If you want more followers than Shoemoney just because it sounds like a good goal, say it proudly. If you stand agast at the notion of offending someone or sounding prideful, then keep your trap closed because no one really wants to hear what you say at all except people stroking themselves for the same self absorbed reasons.

To be honest, I get way more value from following than followers. Why? I get great, up to the minute info from the interesting people that I follow. If someone wants to listen to my blather, that’s great but I’m not going to stop blathering if they don’t. Hell, ask my husband, I talk in my sleep, I don’t need anyone to listen to me!

I have great mutual conversations with some people on twitter and that is special and really what I’m trying to achieve. If this strategy helps me achieve that, then that is awesome and I’m giving it a go.

If someone I follow doesn’t follow me (and yep, that happens, the ABC for example don’t give a stuff about what I’m cooking or whether I think a new restaurant is good or not) then that doesn’t take away from the value of their tweets at all.