Follow Me and I’ll Follow You Back

March 5, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

The following is a guest article by Michael Clark from LondonsWebDesign. The article covers a trending Twitter topic and namely is unfollowing those who aren’t following back a good idea…

Although I’ve only been on Twitter for a relatively short time, I’ve started to see patterns. It’s just one of those wacky things that I do… I don’t know why, but I do. In any event, what I’ve discovered in those user/usage patterns may be of interest to you or may make you think about how you use Twitter yourself.

Twitter, like other things on the Internet or even other things in life, has pluses and minuses. For me, and for many people, I would imagine, everything’s cool until the minuses outweigh the pluses. So what are the pluses and the minuses of Twitter and what does it have to do with seeing patterns? Read on…

One of the things I noticed pretty quickly about Twitter users is the follow-me, follow-you phenomenon.

How it works: someone follows you and you, as so many people do (especially newer users, though) follow back. And why shouldn’t you follow someone back? I mean they took the time to find you and follow you, right? On top of that, Twitter makes it easy and even attractive to follow someone back. Of course, Twitter is based on building relationships and that’s partly why you spend time there. In a fairly short period of time, though, you may realize that it’s not really a good idea to simply follow someone just because they decided to follow you.

It was a particular question that I, and others, have answered at Quorathat got me thinking about the whole follow-me, follow-you idea. The question was “On Twitter, is it a good idea to unfollow those who don’t follow you back? Why or why not?” The discussion which ensued can be viewed at the following link: http://b.qr.ae/fQf4hdthat question on Quora got me thinking about why someone should or shouldn’t follow, or unfollow, somebody else.

Twitter Relationships

On Twitter, again as in real life, people may form different types of relationships. Some relationships you form will mean that you interact with other Twitter users. You may hold Twitter conversations with them or even, in some cases, meet them in real life. Other relationships may be such that you get input from the user you follow without any real “interaction.” For example, I follow the Dalai Lama (his Twitter account is @DalaiLama if you feel like following him as well). I’m not sure why, but he didn’t follow me back. Perhaps he’s busy and he’ll eventually get around to it. It really doesn’t matter, though, as I follow him to enjoy and experience his wisdom and he doesn’t really need to hear me tweet about Web Technology and Social Media to provide that.

Just as I follow some people who don’t follow me back, I won’t necessarily follow somebody on Twitter just because they’ve followed me. And here’s where some more of those patterns I was talking about earlier come into play. When I get new followers, I’ll typically send a direct message to them thanking them for the “follow”. Sometimes I’ll get a reply, but often I won’t (more patterns). Here’s the thing. A number of those new followers, especially the ones that don’t answer my direct “thank you” messages, are actually software-driven. That’s right; they’re basically auto-twitter-bots doing the bidding of someone who wants to gain a large following.

What’s wrong with that you may be thinking? Well… on the surface, nothing. But when I take a closer look at some of these followers, by reading a number of their latest tweets, all I see are a bunch of ads, likely for some product or service I don’t want or need. In other words, the spammer account has followed me, not to read my tweets, but in the hopes that I will blindly follow back so that they can push their ads at me every time I sign onto Twitter.

More patterns

Often, and before I came to see more of the patterns, I would simply look at the number of followers someone had, using this as a gauge of the quality of content I would expect from their tweets. I figured if someone had over 10,000 followers, for example, that they must be doing something right. Doing something wrong is actually more like it in some cases. Depending on the follow-you, follow-me attitude that many Twitter users have adopted, probably before the spammers starting showing up, the spammers’ auto-twitter-bots simply go out and follow as many accounts as the daily limit allows. When you follow 700 Twitter users a day and have many of those users follow you back, you can quickly build a fairly large following. This large following makes the spammer’s account seem attractive, and again following back is SO easy.

Now that I see how easy it is to build a false and even misleading large following, if all you want is a large following, I actually take a little more time deciding whether or not to follow someone. This has made my own number of followers fluctuate daily as more spammers find me, wait for me to not follow, and then (hopefully) abandon me in favour of greener pastures. Maybe if enough of us ignore them they’ll go away. Ahhh, I guess that’s just wishful thinking.

I have to admit that I sometimes felt bad when I first started using Twitter and followers would abandon me. Now I can often tell that the unfollowers are simply unfollowing me because I didn’t reciprocate. No loss. I want followers that follow me because they think I have something to say, or good information to share, not because they think they can sell me something.

Read more web technology articles by Michael Clark at his web design and development web site: LondonsWebDesign. Michael’s Twitter account is @LondonWebDe. Helping Small Business Get the Web” is Michael’s passion, and his design philosophy is “Simpler is Better.” Web Developer, Programmer and Technical Writer since 1996, author of 11 published books on graphic design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator, and college lecturer.

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