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I’m torn. Should you follow back everyone on Twitter that follows you?
I got on twitter on August 2007. None of my friends were on twitter yet and very few in my niche. So I started following anyone who had anything remotely to say that I was interested in. Plus I also followed the few “smores (social media whores)” or people with large numbers of followers.
Smores? I know, funny. That’s what Guy Kawasaki calls them.
Anyway, I had no clue what I was doing, so I just started following as many people as I could.
As my own twitter followers began to grow, and my status grew to “smorrette (Not quite a smore yet)”, it was just impossible to keep up with my twitter feed (a timeline of the tweets of those you are following).
Plus, I could no longer take the time to go to every followers page and decide whether I wanted to follow back or not.
So I started unfollowing a bunch of people that never tweeted, didn’t follow me back, had a picture I didn’t like, etc. Yes, a picture IS worth a thousand words.
Then, in came automation. I subscribed to Tweetlater which is a service that allows you to future post tweets or schedule tweets in the future, like when you’ll be on a plane or jumping out of one. 
It also had two features I began to use. It sent an auto reply message to everyone that followed me and also followed them back automatically.
So, the number of people I was following grew to hundreds. And I was back to square one. Which was a completely useless and crowded twitter feed.
So I did the next logical thing which was completely ignore my public feed and focus instead on posting my own tweets of interesting links, sometimes completely useless mundane tweets, and replying to @replies and direct messages (DM).
This presented a problem though. There were twitterers and topics I was very interested in following.
But in order to do that I had to use twitter’s search function, which took time (not to mention was a huge distraction.)
Solution = I began to use Tweetdeck.
Tweedeck is an application for twitter that not only lets you tweet but also create groups of people to follow, set-up custom searches of keywords and topics, plus see all of your replies and direct messages all in one place.
So I’ve been able to segment the people I want to follow into different lists. For example, I have a list with internet marketers and another one for friends or people I know personally among other lists I’ve created. This lets me see only the tweets I want to see without having to weed them out of my public timeline.
Which brings me back to my question: Should you follow everyone back that follows you?
It seems that there are three things you could do, with popular social media “smores” split between the first two.
1. Follow everyone back.
There seems to be an unwritten rule of twitter etiquette, at least that’s what supporters of this tactic believe, that doing so is not only courteous but it also encourages goodwill between your followers and you and therefore people will respond to you more and everyone who follows them will see this, which leads to more exposure for you. Big twitterers like @guykawasaki and @scobleizer follow this method.
2. Only follow a select few.
Others believe you should only follow those you have a real interest in following. This keeps your feed manageable and although people can’t direct message you if you’re not following them, you can still see the replies sent to you.
It also gives your profile some exclusivity since you only follow certain people. Most of the well known internet marketers like @ed_dale or @masscontrolkern follow this method.
3. Follow as many people as you can as fast as possible.
This is one I definetely don’t recommend. It’s called Follow spam and it could possibly get your account suspended by Twitter. Follow Spam is when you follow a mass number of people, not because you are interested in their tweets but because you want to gain attention by generating views to your profile and clicks to your website. It’s the shotgun approach to twittering.
You’ll be seen as a spammer and possibly have your account suspended by Twitter. Some people have even created programs to automate the following which lets them follow thousands of people at the blink of an eye.
So there you have it. What do you think, to follow ALL or only a few?
Well, how ’bout for now just following one more.
You can follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/yisel
