Follow you, follow me: automatic follower reciprocation phenomenon

As anyone who’s be using Social media for more than a few months will tell you there is this accepted practice of automatically following everyone who follow you. I call this Automatic Follower Reciprocation Phenomenon and I am here to tell you that it is pretty much bunk. While maintaining a large follower base is important if you wish to say win a book deal, or land that golden Social Media Job, it is really not as important as the quality of followers.

First of all let me explain the unlike Facebook or LinkedIn profile linking is an asynchronous experience. You are always welcome to follow me but in doing so I do not automatically follow you. I personally evaluate each new follower account before electing to follow back. Perhaps it is best to start off with a few examples so that we can all understand why I am debunking the myth that you must follow everyone who follows you on twitter. If you have email notifications turned on in your twitter options and seriously you should, then you have no doubt received those new follower notices. The following is an example of one of those messages.

I guarantee should you awake one morning to receive the above message in your inbox that you would follow back faster than it takes to actually read the email. I would wager however that you are also already quite likely following @Alyssa_Milano on twitter as she happens to be one of the few truly sincere celebrities that use the service. She is one of those rare people who sincerely tries to help people. For example yesterday she posted about a german shepherd that needed a home. One of the first tweets I ever retweeted was about a family who’s house burned down and needed help. Care to venture a guess who the the source was.

This naturally leads me to the subject of celebrity following, I have a very simple rule of thumb and that is that 90% of the celebrities on twitter are not worth following. I am sorry but neither Ashton Kutcher nor Oprah contribute less than 1% of the tweet quality that @Alyssa_Milano does. Therefore unless you are truly a fan of the celebrity I would suggest you spend your follower capital somewhere else. Ok enough about celebrities as I do follow a certain few, but it is either I am a fan of their work or we have had the opportunity to engage in intelligent conversation thus their follow value is personally rather high for me.

On the other end of the spectrum is the low tweeting spam bots. They are usually tied to some adult profile site and are the main reason that I always wait a few days to a week before looking at the profile. Generally speaking this probation period allows for twitter to suspend these sorts of accounts so that I do not waste my following resource. The following are two examples of these sorts of account.

As you can see in Figures 2 & 3 these two accounts have a relatively low follower account and generally have less than 10 tweets. They are usually following a bunch of other people and were you able to see their profile page before it got suspended there would have been a few tweets about how they just posted some nude pictures on another site. This sort of obvious follower spam generally gets sorted out within a few days and as I mentioned before is the main reason I wait as much as a week before following back.

However there are other reasons. I have found that their are groups of insidious followers out there who follow and immediately unfollow just to generate these sorts of email alerts from twitter. Therefore I prefer to use some service such as Twitter Karma to follow up on my new followers. It is much easier to verify who is following me as well as weigh the follower reciprocation value.

Next up are the befuddling enigma accounts. These are the ones with extremely high follow & follower numbers but relatively no tweet value. I still have not for the life of me figured out these accounts. The best that I can figure is that these accounts are on autopilot and not truly active. Eventually when Titter discovers that they are still using automated services to add more followers I expect that the will go the way of the SpamBots as previously noted.

Please understand that I am not saying that you shouldn’t follow either of these accounts or accounts with similar characteristics. However you should carefully consider their value to your tweet stream before you decide to do so.

What I am saying here is that I am utterly flummoxed by these accounts and the relatively low social media value. Sure they have an extremely high follower count but until they actually engage these followers what value is there in following them? Certainly direct messages or DMs as they are known are not counted in the tweet count, but you must ask yourself do you really want to follow someone who only DMs you and is not involved in the great conversation?

While on the subject of DMs let’s consider the legitimate followers for a second. Those that unfortunately were sold on the auto-DM services. I will tell you the fastest way to alienate your followers is to ascribe to one of these services. The last thing any twitter user wants is a large mailbox full of DM spam. Even if you do not use an auto-DM service but manually send a welcome to each new follower, I am recommending that you cease and desist from the practice. In the current environment it is more than likely to cost you followers rather than endear them to you. In addition it is bad form to DM someone who can respond via DM, therefore; if you do not follow the person do not DM. Seriously save your DMs for something truly DM worthy.

Ok so now you are probably curious what I think will get you those followers you so desperately seek. Well the first stage is to be engaging and approachable. You need to listen to your tweet stream and carefully fish out something relevant to RePost. RePosting by the way is the new ReTweet. It turns out that Twitter has secretly been working to discourage the use of the traditional RT by excluding any post from the search results that contains a RT but that is a subject for another article.

In any event RePosting RP something from someone you follow is a great way to start the conversation. I have found that 9 times out of 10 they will respond with a heartfelt thank you. If you do this often enough they are likely to follow you back especially if you left a positive note on their . In addition some of your followers may pickup the post and in turn RP it to their followers and you base will definitely grow.

In addition if you are following a writer who just posted about a new article they’ve written and are asking for feedback. Then take a the risk read the article and offer some constructive criticism if you have any, but always leave a comment preferably as positive as you can in the blog lines. You need to demonstrate your value as a follower before people will follow you.

Another way to improve your following base is to attend social media conferences. I met numerous people at the last #140Conf in NYC. Meeting someone face to face and discussing social media with others is a sure fire way to get noticed. You are 99% more likely to engage in a follower exchange when you meet someone face to face than you are through social media outlets alone.

Ok so now let me just touch upon new accounts. You can usually tell a new account from the spam accounts because the new accounts don’t even bother to put up an avatar photo. In the following email alert you will observe this issue.

Ultimately the worse thing you can do is start shouting from your new twitter account that you are here and people should just follow you. People need to perceive value from following you and failing to demonstrate your value will yield rather lackluster results. Let’s examine the above use’s page for more clues as to why they have not progressed very far.

This new user has made a grave error by not filling out the basic information to help identify who they are they have effectively cut off any hopes of building a follower base. How am I to perceive value in this an account that has no description, photo or even location? How am I possibly going to build a connection to this person? They will have to work extremely hard to reverse the negative impact of these decisions. You can understand possibly why I wait as much as a week before I examine someone’s profile to make a decision to follow them back or not.

Obviously if they are engaging in conversation with me and RePosting my URLs and tweets their is a likelihood that I will forgo the profile check and just click follow in TweetDeck. Why shouldn’t I such an individual has demonstrated that they value what I am saying. However to shout at me “Hey I followed you and you should follow me back it’s only right!” is really ineffective. Honestly ask yourself do you fall into one of the descriptions above? Have you demonstrated you Social Media Value or are you a vapid waste of time?

Yes I know that’s harsh but perhaps spending less time shouting and more conversing then maybe you’ll understand the conundrum. I will leave you with this, be helpful, be valuable, be considerate, be unique and most of all be respectful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King (http://twitter.com/mikelking) has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for BSD News.