Twitter etiquette

Should You Follow Someone on Twitter if they Never Follow Back?

in Twitter

What’s the point of following someone on Twitter if they decidedly don’t follow back? Not just you – they don’t follow back anyone, as a matter of principal. Would you follow someone like that? Should you?

It depends. What are you trying to get out of Twitter? If you’re looking for information about someone that interests you, and that person chooses to only broadcast information on Twitter rather than communicate and interact, then by all means, follow them. Following them will give you information and insight into that person. You could try to get their attention by retweeting their stuff or asking them questions.

If you view Twitter as a tool for making connections with others in your field, staying in touch and exchanging ideas, then it probably doesn’t make sense to follow someone who does not follow back, although, if they respond to questions and to retweets, there IS a connection there.

Are the people who follow no one back terrible people, so vain and full of themselves that they don’t want to listen to anyone – just talk? Hardly. I suspect that most of them simply prefer to connect and interact via other mediums. They view Twitter as a tool for sharing their insights – not for talking with others.

They also save a lot of time. If you decide that you are not going to follow anyone, you avoid a lot of tedious Twitter-induced work – checking who followed you and deciding if you are going to follow back, finding relevant people to follow and following them. And in a way you’re being fair – you follow no one, unlike some celebs who only follow other celebs, for example.

On my personal Twitter account, I only follow those who follow back, because I view it as a tool for a two-way conversation. But for my clients, I do not rule out following a prominent individual in their field who does not follow back.

Twitter Etiquette

in Twitter

Like everything in business, and in life, Twitter has a certain etiquette that you need to follow if you want it to work. I’m actually in the process of writing a detailed Twitter manual for a client, but in the meantime, it’s easiest to explain proper Twitter etiquette by talking about a couple of things you should NOT do when you join Twitter.

Don’t Use Automated Following Tools

They are generally worthless. It’s much better to follow manually – it’s the only way to make sure that the people you follow, and the followers you get, are truly relevant to your business.

It’s also much better to have a small Twitter account with a small, high-quality following than to artificially inflate your number of followers – but end up with a bunch of followers who couldn’t care less about your tweets.

Contrary to what some people seem to believe, Twitter is NOT a popularity contest. Twitter is a smart way to network and to efficiently market your products, services and ideas. Having 200 hand-picked, relevant followers is far better in terms of ROI than having 2,000 or even 20,000 non-targeted followers who ignore you.

Don’t Be Too Obvious

Sure, I keep saying here that Twitter is a marketing tool, and it is, but just as you would do in any other form of marketing, you need to be subtle about your wish to sell and never appear pushy or aggressive.

Your tweets need to be a mix of hardcore sales pitches, retweets of your followers, answers to your followers, general industry information and links, and personal thoughts and observations. If all you ever tweet is “buy from me,” unless those tweets offer huge value such as coupon codes and discounts on products that people would want to buy anyway, your tweets become a huge turnoff.

The account below is making every possible mistake, which is why I never bothered to follow them back when they (automatically) followed me. They are obviously using automated following tools – Twitter places an initial limit of 2000 on the amount of people you can follow, and then you can follow more depending on how many are following back. So a new account that follows 2001 people uses automated tools. In addition, they only tweet “buy from me” type tweets.

How not to do Twitter 1

The result? They are being ignored by their fake automated followers and their Twitter account is basically worthless. A simple way to check if a Twitter account has responses from followers is to use Twitter Search to search for the account’s username preceded by the symbol @:

how not to tweet 3

Compare to my own Twitter account which is in no way a huge account – I am far from being a power tweeterer – but my account does have targeted followers and as a result some real conversation and interaction:

how not to tweet 4

Twitter requires time and patience. Build it slowly, follow just a few relevant people at a time, and interact with them. It may take several months or more before you see results, in the form of retweets that get your name out there, links to your site and interested visitors, but the results will be there and they will be real. Take the Twitter shortcut and your account will be worthless.