Twitter in Real Life: The Follow Back

Twitter in Real Life: The Follow Back, originally uploaded by HubSpot.

When people follow me on twitter I usually try to find out who they are, determine why they are following me, and then decide if I want to follow them back.

I use a few criteria to determine whether I will follow them back.

I prefer that they have more followers than they follow, but not way out of whack . If they have some kind of parity between the number of followers and those they follow, that doesn’t really send up a red flag for me either. And then there are the numbers of updates they have sent out…. after all, if you’re going to follow someone, isn’t it because you’re interested in their contribution to the conversation?

Recently I was followed by a real estate broker who was following 900 people and had 300 followers. That threw up a red flag, but then I saw that he had NO updates. Obviously, he had nothing to say, but had gotten a follower building strategy from some seminar or workshop, and was determined to build his “tribe”. Only if he had no updates, the only followers he had would be people who auto-followed him when he followed them – so what was the strength of his influence on these followers? Limited at best I would assume. And if he was only using the twitter stream as a database to “email” information and links to? Then I believe that people would start dropping his as soon as the strategy became evident. After all , who goes on twitter or facebook to increase the amount of advertising they receive?

So when you build your community, keep in mind that you need to “give love” to “get love” and that the beauty of social media marketing is the positioning of yourself as the expert and trusted source of information that we all want to be for our customers and clients. And lets keep the direct mail and spam were it belongs – out of the social media space.

Tags: HubSpot, Marketing, On the Web, Online Communities, Red flag, social networking, Spam, Twitter