5 reasons why I don’t follow you on Twitter

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

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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
4. It’s been 6 months since your last tweet. Why would I follow someone who doesn’t talk?
5. 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.

1. I know you. If I have met you in the real world I am very likely to follow you.
2. You tweet interesting things. Content is king! Tweets I like most include video games, web design and entertainment related ones.
3. 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.
4. 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?

Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).

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