Twitter Rant – Autofollow or Not Autofollow?

Normally I wouldn’t use this blog as a rant platform, but I just couldn’t help myself this time.

As the title suggests I have a bugbear with Twitter. Well not the platform itself, I absolutely love that and the new ‘friends’ I’ve made through it.

My issue is with some of the users themselves.

Every morning I fire up my Mac and check my emails. Without fail there’s an email from Twitter listing all my new followers.

Now, I’m not an ‘automatic following’ kinda gal, instead I go through the list, check out their profiles and what they tweet about to see if they are my kind of people; the type I can engage with, learn from and generally have a bit of Twitter banter with.

Recently, I’ve noticed that several of my new followers have thousands upon thousands of followers themselves. My initial thought was ‘wow, someone with that many followers wants to follow me?’

As usual I check out their profile and look at their tweets to decide whether to follow back or not. If I don’t, it is not any reflection on them as a person, it’s just that their tweets aren’t relevant to me, perhaps they’ve not tweeted for a while, or they just appear to tweet about their business. Whatever the reason, it’s not personal.

But I’m now finding, more often than not, those with thousands of followers soon unfollow me when I don’t follow back (do you follow?). That suggests to me that they those Tweeters who are just in it for the numbers game, wanting to rack up as many followers as possible.

Why?

You can’t possibly keep track of everything that’s going on in your Twitterverse, or engage with your fellow tweeters, so what’s the point in trying to amass as many followers as possible?

It’s a mystery to me.

As far as I’m concerned, Twitter is all about relationships, camaraderie and good old-fashioned networking. It’s opened numerous doors to me that would have otherwise been closed purely because I’m engaging and posting useful information.

My hope is that people follow me because they like what I tweet about – yes there is the odd inane tweet that goes out about needing coffee etc., but on the whole I like to think that the information I share is of value.

So if you want a bit of banter, tips on copywriting and marketing, or just a connection you can tap for information now and then, I’m @sallyormond.

Rant over – normal service will resume with the next post.

Thanks for listening.