To Follow Or Not
Posted on May 24, 2010
Filed Under Social Media | Leave a Comment
I had a bit of a twitter paddy last night after using one of the Twitter analysis tools and discovering that a large number of businesses I was following weren’t following me back. I promptly un-followed them all, but I’m now having second thoughts. Ever since I joined Twitter in the height of the Obama Presidential campaign and read about how he (or rather his team) followed back everyone who followed him on Twitter – the article was holding this up as a great example of netiquette and how Team Obama ‘got’ online communications – I’ve presumed that following back was good practice for businesses on Twitter but is it?
The way I saw it was that businesses should be eager to engage and that not following back was tantamount to snubbing the tweeter who had taken the time to show an interest in your brand. I’ve just taken a little time to search through the Web to see what people are saying on the topic and the only arguments against that I can figure out are that it can lead to too much noise and that you could end up following spam or bots. With regards to the first point about excess ‘noise’, surely that’s where aggregators such as HootSuite come into play, letting you set up alerts for key words or phrases and lists where you can monitor a select number of your followers in one place. As for the second point, I can’t believe it takes more than a couple of seconds to determine from their profile pic and recent tweets whether a twitter follower is spam or not.
I can only see positives from following a tweeter who has taken the time to express an interest in your brand. It shows them you’re aware of their presence, that you care what they say (whether you do or not and whether you actually tune into what they are saying or not) and it presents an additional opportunity for getting your brand displayed – the email to say you’re following them and the display of your brand in their followers list.
I’m perhaps cutting off my nose to spite my face now and will no doubt miss out on some amazing offer from a business that I stopped following because they never followed me back – and I don’t imagine for one minute that they are mourning my absence – but I feel like if any business can go to the effort of creating a Twitter account but can’t take a few seconds a day to re-follow its followers then I’m not that bothered about hearing what they’re saying. I’d love to hear if there was another reason for businesses not automatically following its followers that I’ve missed but in the meantime if I was a business, I would re-follow my followers…probably.
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