Monday Muse: What’s Your Twitter Follow Strategy?

Jun

Monday Muse: What’s Your Twitter Follow Strategy?

Posted on June 29th, 2009 in Monday Muse, Technology by Fred McKinnon

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twitter_follow_me_x Hey Gang,

Today’s “Monday Muse” has to do with “Twitter”. At this point, I don’t feel like I need to explain what Twitter.Com is all about – you’ve already heard it everywhere. (By the way, if you aren’t following my tweets, now is a good time to start! @fmckinnon from me, @theworshipcomm for TheWorshipCommunity.Com and @ebusinessonline for the E-BusinessOnline.Com forum)

My question is this:

“What is your Twitter Follow Strategy”?

Do you follow everyone who follows you?
Do you only follow a select few people?
If you don’t follow everyone, how do you determine who you DO follow?

I’ve been on the “auto-follow” everyone but I have to confess, I’m seriously reconsidering this strategy. Although I’ve found some cool people in my timeline talking about worship and leadership, I’ve also found “followers” who had obsene profiles, pornographic material, and other junk that I could care less about. Not to mention I don’t like getting their “thanks for following me, check my site for the best deals on mortgage loans” direct messages.

So, what’s your strategy?

http://brodyharper.com Brody Harper

I’ve never auto-followed. My rule is if I’ve heard of you, I will follow you. That means if you’ve responded to something I have said and I read it, or if we have communicated in some way, I will follow you. That’s got me following about 400 people, but at least I know they are legit.
http://www.fredmckinnon.com Fred McKinnon

Brody,
Excellent response, that’s the strategy I think I may move to. I started out that way .. and was swayed when lots of leaders I read moved to the “follow everyone” strategy. As for reading tweets, it’s not a huge issue because of TweetDeck’s groups … I have the “real” group that I follow called “Friends”, which is people I know or whom I’m interacting with (which includes tons of folks I’ve never met) ….

Thanks for your quick reply!
http://mikeymo1741.blogspot.com Mike

I don’t auto-follow. I check my new followers a couple of times a week. When I see a new follower, I check their feed to see if they post interesting things, and don’t post too much to be “noise.” If they have a web link, I check their site to see if they are interesting and relevant.

I unfollow people who give me too much “noise” and not enough “content.”

http://www.fredmckinnon.com Fred McKinnon

Mike,
Good deal – having to manage the “follows” is one reason I went auto-follow, it was an advantage to be able to disregard the follow emails … but I see the value in it.

So … have you unfollowed me yet? (folks around here are constantly giving me a hard time about my over-twittering)

http://mikeymo1741.blogspot.com Mike

So let me ask you this: What’s the point of following someone if you’re going to filter them out anyway and not read any of their tweets?

No, I haven’t unfollowed you, mainly because your tweets (generally ) are “content.” TBH, the redundancy of following you and TWC can be trying. That’s why I unfollowed @churchcrunch. @human3rror re-posts everything anyway, so why do I need both?

Just this morning I unfollowed something who (while some of his posts have some meat) sends 30 tweets a day about the song playing on the radio. I unfollowed another dude last week who I liked, but he would send six tweets in a row. Obviously he doesn’t get Twitter!

That’s probably more info than you wanted, but there it is!

http://www.mandoron.com MandoRon

No auto-follows. Similar to Mike, I check new followers to see if it looks interesting, or is just somebody trying to sell something.

I use Tweetdeck to sort through the people that I want to keep track of, and the one’s that I don’t keep close tabs on.
http://www.invisibleworshipmusician.com Junjie

I follow people who might be interesting or those I already know.

In general those I don’t know but take the initiative to follow me will be involved with either worship ministry or internet marketing in some way or other. So I follow them to keep tabs on what they’re doing. Once in a while they have something interesting and helpful for me, so I have no complaints.

http://www.mandoron.com MandoRon

Funny… I specifically avoid the internet marketing types…

Rebecca

To tweet or not to tweet…

For the sake of my job, my time and my sanity I have chosen not to twitter at all.

http://www.fredmckinnon.com Fred McKinnon

Rebecca,

YES – thanks for chiming in … “not tweeting” is definitely just as much a strategy!

Rebecca

I know it’s not for everyone, but it’s worked for me thus far.

Dan Gross

Ditto a lot of what was said above. My rules are generally:
1.) Straight up spam/porn: block
2.) Bot-follows (those people with bots set up to follow people if they tweet a keyword.): no follow-back (but I don’t block).
3.) Tweet-hoarders (people out just gathering up as many follow-backs as possible): generally don’t follow-back.
4.) Artists/bands: Check out their myspace, etc. Follow-back if I like it.
5.) Others: check recent tweets. If reasonable, give a “test follow.” If I find after a time I’m not really interacting with them, or if they get too “noisy,” unfollow.

A caveat: anyone who claims to be a “social media guru” in their bio generally does not get followed back.

I’m more about building community rather than growing my follower base. To give you an idea, while my following/followers is about equal (221/261), friendorfollow says I have “mutual follows” with 128 people. I try to manage it such that I can more or less keep up with everyone. Tweetdeck helps with that (though I would like for them to pull more tweets on start-up!). My columns are “Friends” (mostly 3D fans, as that community is what dragged me into Twitter), “Celebs” (anyone who gathers followers based on “who they are”…IOW most in this column do not follow me back), “News” (some “news” type tweets + official feeds, etc… @theworshipcomm is in there), “Other” (everyone else). Most of my unfollows come from the “other” column though most of my “Others” do stay.

So that’s more than you needed to know, but that’s the general method to my madness…
http://www.russhutto.com Russ Hutto

No autofollows here.

There’s no real point (from where I sit) in following a billion people. I follow people that add to the quality of the conversation I’m already engaged in.

For example, I don’t follow a whole lot of folks OTHER than graphic design and church/worship leadership oriented peeps.

It keeps my conversations focused and I feel like instead of being at a “cocktail party” with thousands of people I have nothing in common with, at the very least, I’m now at a cocktail party with people that all share the same interests. (google twitter is (was) a cocktail party).
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http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1405481054 Jennifer Hudson

No auto-follow here, and I have had a few un-follow me b/c I didn’t follow them back right away.

I follow people that I’m friends with IRL, that seem interesting, or that I think I can learn something from. I’m still new to Twitter, so I’m still learning how it all works – and I don’t want to devote an entire day to catching up on the tweets of EVERYONE.

I go through my followers about every 2 weeks to see if there is someone interesting in there that I’ve been missing, and to block those that are “too” interesting.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=657911289 Steve Lowe

I haven’t really thought through a strategy, honestly. There are three main groups of people I follow: Friends and Family, Worhsip Arts, and NASCAR personalities and news. If someone follows me that fits into one of those categories, I’ll look at their twitter page on the web, read a few tweets and decide if I want to follow them. I’ll unfollow people, even friends, who spam with tweeterfollow or similar, and I’ll report porn spammers immediately via DM to @spam.
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http://kitpalmer.wordpress.com Kit Palmer

On TweetDeck, I have 4 catagories:

Community – Friends, Family & other people I have had legitimate interactions with.

Mentors – Mostly pastors, plus a few others whos tweets I find inspiring.

Music – Pretty much what you would think here.

News – Again, the obvious here.

If you don’t fit into one of these groups, I don’t follow you. I guess it comes down to what you are looking for in this type of forum. This works for me.
http://kimbontrager.wordpress.com kimbontrager

I don’t autofollow and I have absolutely no interest in growing my ‘follower’ number through followers who are not real people. And my computer can’t handle TweetDeck, so I have to keep the list of people I follow manageable.

About once a week I use TwitterKarma to sort through all those who are following me but I’m not following. And then….

If you’re a twitbot who followed me only b/c of a keyword in one of my posts…. block.
If you’re clearly not a real person, or you’re crazy wicked porn or something… block.
If you ARE a real person but there’s something creepy about your twitter page and/or blog… block.
If you’re a real person, but there’s not anything that really compels me to want to follow you, I won’t follow you, but I won’t block you.
If you’re a resource tweet regarding something I’m actually interested in (like local weather or news)…. follow
If you’re a real person in one of my areas of interest & you contribute something interesting, and especially if you have a real blog…. follow.

I don’t like that I’m sorting this all out manually, but honestly it’s only been in the past 2-3 weeks that it’s become really necessary. Seems like the auto-follow/keyword follow traffic has really picked up.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=682168011 Rich Kirkpatrick

I follow most people except…

real estate, get rich on twitter or any $$ people, MLM is hte plague, and people who have 50,000 followers and never interact…
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=692817563 Alex McLean

I had autofollow on for quite a while – it got me up to over 600 people that I was following. I began missing tweets that were important to me so I first turned off the autofollow (another story, I couldn’t remember which service was autofollowing, so I had to change my password which jacked up a bunch of other services!). Then I went through my list and unfollowed over 500 or so people to get back down to a manageable amount.

Now my strategy is, I follow who I want to follow, not just anybody who follows me. And I’m not afraid of unfollowing someone who is becoming annoying or whatever.

It’s been cathartic to say the least.
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http://travispaulding.com Travis

No auto-following here. I use Twitapps to get a daily email of any follow and unfollow changes and I react accordingly. I don’t follow someone when they follow me if they don’t seem like someone who I would connect with (spam, marketing, etc.). If someone follows me and I don’t follow them back, and they don’t respond to anything I say within a few days then they probably didn’t follow me for any good reasons. If they followed me and actually want to connect then I imagine they will reach out to me in some way.

I don’t feel the need to block anyone that follows me since I am not auto-following back. If someone turns creeper on me then I will block.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=613030297 Wayne Thomas

No “auto follows” here, either. I simply follow folks if they are worship leaders, professing Christians, or close friends or family. I’m actually pretty cautious with who I follow. I think I’m up to 209 now.

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Monday Muse: What’s Your Twitter Follow Strategy?

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