Follow me, I’ll follow you…maybe

I’m always baffled by twitter accounts that have a ton of followers but no tweets. A “Follow Strategy” can be beneficial to new twitter accounts but beware as it can also offend potential followers.

When I get a new follower, I look at a few things before following them back:

What are their following/follower amounts? If they’re following close to 2,000 people and have a significantly different amount of followers, they’re probably new to twitter and chances are it’s a spam/bot account. Twitter puts a cap on following 2,000 users as a maximum until your follower number is close to being equal.

Do they reply to others? If their tweets are purely content tweets or retweets (no replies), I don’t see a great benefit in following them back. If I’m looking for specific content, I’ll go to google. I prefer to talk with others on twitter and will follow people if they have at least some two-way conversations in their stream.

Do they have any mutual followers? Having a number of my tourism or local friends follow them only adds to their credibility. It’s a little hard to sort through but a good way is to look through for the names of people I know their twitter stream (as mentions) or in their following/follower lists.

FriendorFollow is a great tool to help maintain your twitter account. How do you determine whether to follow someone back?

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