I’ve long wondered about why people follow me on Twitter.
Weirder still, is the culture of “follow back.”
You know what I mean, that “follow me, I follow you” shit. It’s garbage. It’s for follower counters.
I follow people who help me. It ain’t a favour to them. I learn from these people. They share stuff I like and find relevant to my existence. If someone follows me and I see that they tweet about needle pointing, I won’t follow back, because I don’t give a shit about needles or points.
I unfollow people who tweet overly self promotory stuff, try to sell me too hard or who I made a mistake about (I thought it was PR they were concerned about but it is really needle pointing).
Why do you follow people on Twitter? Do you follow back immediately? Why do you unfollow?
Great post. Absolutely agree with you, Jackson. I don’t feel obliged to follow someone just because they follow me. The decision to start following someone is defined in several steps: firstly I check out their bio on Twitter, then I see whether they have a blog and read some of their recent tweets. This is a useful way to decide whether or not to follow someone according to your own understanding on how to use Twitter. For me, it’s essential to follow PR specialists who don’t spam me, but share interesting links, which are not self-promotion or connected only with their clients. And when you know who you need to follow, then you start building your network of connections which can be very fruitful resource.