One of the “unwritten” expectations of Twitter is to follow back people that follow you. This little tradition may have been seeded by the whales who measure Twitter success by the size of their followings. If you are just getting started with your Twitter account, it only takes a minute each day to check on your new followers and check them out and follow them back. If your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) has awakened the Twitter whale within, it is important to do this exercise at least once every 24-hour period. Twitter whales use their daily allocation of follows to find prospective followers. Many run this cycle every 24 hours, and if you haven’t followed them back, you are unfollowed to free up room for their next day’s binge follow.
Most recently, OurNEWSCafe.com has tested two programs that offer automated follow-back, TweetLater.com and TwitterHit.com. We’ll save comparisons for future blogs. As our base of followers has grown, we’ve found the technology saved us a lot of time. No longer required to click on the follow button of each and every person who was so kind as to follow us, we can now focus on more important things like say, blogging. It was a nice break from the mundane task of going through page after page of followers.
As with any automated technology there are pitfalls to the Twitter auto follow. In the beginning, we filtered all the follow-backs individually. Our standards were – must have a picture in the avatar, first and last name, and not be porn. With Twitter auto follow-back, we no longer had the urgency to check every 24 hours for fear we’d lose someone waiting for the reciprocation. Now we could check back at our leisure and make sure the people we are following meet our standards. In theory, this was all great until one day a buddy asked if my wife knew we were following these porn sites with explicit pictures. HUH? With a speedy check, we discovered the Twitter auto follower had indeed followed-back some porn sites that had followed us. Not the end of the world, as we simply un-followed the sites. But what about a church, clergy, or community figure? Can we simply assume everyone understands? We can tell you with the utmost confidence, NO, it is not okay.
Arguably, another pitfall of the Twitter auto follow is the sheer volume it creates over time and our standards of who we follow back have eroded. Whales want numbers for numbers sake. At this point, we are trying to filter creatively, but yet profane names and the porn pics and spam, but have loosened up on others.
If you are responsible for the PR/Communications for a business or high profile individual, all should be aware of the potential pitfalls of Twitter auto follow.
[...] This post was Twitted by MrRoachie [...]