I have a fair few people following me on Twitter. It's not as many as some Twitter users but it's enough to make me feel a little bit special - after all I don't know all my followers.
Because there are so many people following me I thought I should explain why I don't neccessarily follow you back automatically.
Why I don't follow you on Twitter
- Your profile is incomplete. If your description empty or you haven't listed a website then I won't know what you do or who you are. Give me a reason to follow you and I will be more likely to say hi some time.
- You don't tweet (primarily) in English. I recently had some one send a tweet to me saying goodbye. He was upset that I hadn't followed him back... But all his tweets were in Spanish - if I can't understand you there's no point me following you!
- You're a spammer. I classify Twitter spammers in a few different ways. They are:
- people with many friends and few followers
- people who always tweet the same link
- people who call themselves SEO's and have awful websites with no good content
- It's been 6 months since your last tweet. Why would I follow someone who doesn't talk?
- You've sent 20 tweets in the last 10 minutes. Since I like to read as many of the tweets from my friends as possible I don't want all the other tweets drowned out by one or two people.
Why I will follow you on Twitter
Rather than be entirely negative below are the reasons I WILL follow you.
- I know you. If I have met you in the real world I am very likely to follow you.
- You tweet interesting things. Content is king! Tweets I like most include video games, web design and entertainment related ones.
- You have a cool website. If I go to a new website, and it interests me, then I am quite likely to not only follow you on Twitter but to subscribe to the rss feed.
- You @reply fun/ helpful things. I like to find out cool stuff.
So what reasons do you have for following/ not following someone on Twitter? Do any of mine sound familiar?
10 Responses to “5 reasons why I don’t follow you on Twitter” Leave a reply ›
Thanks for sharing your set of rules Ben. I'm relatively new to Twitter and wasn't sure what to expect. Like you I've been naturally suspicious of followers that I don't know who follow many people but have few followers themselves. From the outset I began "moderating" my followers by blocking a good number of them—using much the same rules as yours above. I don't know that this is especially good twitterquette but it seems as necessary as moderating blog comments. Interesting that you felt the need to explain why you don't automatically follow people in turn; I never felt that was an obligation. I would also add "You're local" to the list of reasons to follow someone; it's a bit like listening to the local radio station as you get to hear (and see, if they tweet images) what's going on around you.
Hey Bruce - I've never really considered auto follows as essential either, but I've seen a few different people mention recently that they stop following people who don't follow them back. Having seen how many followers some people have I feel I don't want to end up that way. I don't think I could handle following the conversation if there were 2000+ people all tweeting at the same time.
BTW I like the idea of the "you're local" thing - I'd not really considered that at the time but think I will watch out for it in the future.
Very accurate listing. Add me to the tweeps, for which this list is true.
I've never understood why people complain, when they follow someone, that they're not followed in return. If someone likes what I'm saying enough to follow me, great - but I'm not going to arbitrarily follow everyone who does so. If someone writes on a topic I'm interested in, I may follow them. If they're intersting or funny, I may follow them.
And I unfollow people fairly often, but usually for posting far too much, far too fast.
I completely agree with this list. As for the "local" condition, I use the iPhone/iPod Touch application "Twinkle" and that grabs tweets from Twinkle users within a certain radius (displayed on a separate page from the people you follow). It's very good for notifications of what's going on in, but it's limited because there isn't a huge Twinkle community in my area. Also, IP-pinpointing isn't completely reliable.
Myself I follow peeps who are interesting and have good info to share with others. I don't care if anyone follows me or not. If the peep that I follow gets boring or I lose interest then I will unfollow without a second thought. I usually will follow a peep for a week or so to check the content if their tweets.
I completely agree with this list, especially because I am Spanish and I need to write in English and sometimes it is not easy to me
The numbers game in Twitter bothers me to a certain degree. When I was following nearly everyone who followed me, my numbers looked great, but the quality of my incoming tweet stream declined into a mosh of unintelligible and therefore useless noise. However, when I unfollowed everyone who didn't meet my personal criteria (very close to yours in this blog post) I began to lose far more followers than I gained, resulting in a downward spiral of my numbers. Interestingly enough, the value of my incoming tweet stream has steadily increased, yet seeing the numbers go down still feels bad. I have some opinions as to why that is, but I think I'll save 'em for a blog post of my own.
I usually follow those that RT other tweeters. I usually read their content for at least a week and if I loose interest in them or they just overwhelm me with how often they post, then I will unfollow them. I don't care how many follow me, I enjoy twitter for the different info that I can use then I share them with my circle of friends and family.
Completely agree with your thoughts. I have a personal account and pretty much subscribe to your views and we will adopt the same policy for our business twitter account.