I’ve seen the complainers as well. They forget that being followed should be earned on the basis of content. That said my policy varies depending on the account. On my main account I follow back anyone who seems vaguely interesting, assuming they actually converse and we have something in common. (Which could be anything from Web development to bacon or philsophy.) The biz accounts I treat differently. On one I’m trying to target a very specific niche and am only following back people who really understand the field or want to learn more. The other (@coventryvillage) has a much looser niche of Greater Clevelanders, particularly those with an interest in arts, culture, food and anyone else who digs Coventry. There I’m following back most people, excluding spammers or auto-followers who seem to have no interest/connection to Cleveland or the aforementioned topics.

Authentic conversation remains the biggest challenge. I find it is easier to converse as me than as another entity, so I have to look harder for conversational-ins. But as I scan my main feed (and filter it by various searches in Tweetdeck) the opportunities appear, and thus I try to join in when appropriate.

I look forward to seeing what you have planned next!

We do not believe in Auto-Following. That is SPAM. However, we do believe in niche based mass following. To be effective in a campaign, this will require un-following as well. I have seen some people complain about people un-following them, especially locally here in Cleveland. Most of those people deserved to be un-followed anyway . I like to think about it as pruning a tree, makes it stronger and healthier.

The Twitter News feed is gibberish! Which is why Search has evolved to be the only way to cut thru the noise on Twitter whether you follow 100 people or 100,000 people. Either way, thanks for taking a look at the program, we have a few more tricks up our sleeve!

Awhile back I wrote a post, My Twitter following habits aren’t better than yours; they’re just different. that gives a broader overview on my thoughts about reciprocal following.

In the time since I wrote that I’ve become even fussier about who I follow back. Now I bet I follow only 1 in 20 new Tweeps who follow me. Is that because I’m a Twitter bum? Not really. Mostly it’s because I get followed by a lot of spammers and others who only post but don’t converse. Many of them are using auto-following systems to artificially build their numbers. If I followed them all back, they wouldn’t unfollow me, and I’d have far more followers than my current 4,421, but my main Twitter stream would be full of gibberish. And most of these people wouldn’t be listening to me anyway. (Why shout at a crowd that has its back turned to you?) So instead I prefer to keep manual control and not follow back the people who aren’t contributing positively to the system.

This also helps me keep my follower/followee ratio more natural. When I see ratio’s with high numbers that are fairly close to each other I usually see that as a sign that someone is using an auto-following system and is probably someone not worth following (with some exceptions). For example I’ve seen people with 6K+ followers who have only made 3 Tweets. So many people are gaming the system that it becomes harder and harder to weed out those who aren’t worthwhile. So I don’t follow them back unless I can see that they are actually conversing. If they drop me that’s O.K., but I guess I’d prefer they drop me because they don’t dig my Tweets than because I’m not reciprocating. (Esp. as I am often behind on checking my follow requests.)

Best wishes with the new program. I’m playing devil’s advocate because it’s not a system that would work for me (I am following 898 cool Tweeps who aren’t reciprocating, according to friendorfollow.com) but I hope it proves useful to you and your readers. Cheers – Heidi