Poll - Questioning Twitter Etiquette - Is Reciprocal Following Required?
Sunday March 8, 2009
Some say proper Twitter etiquette is to follow each person who signs up to follow you. What do you think? Just because someone is interested in your content, do you feel obligated to follow them in return? When you follow someone, do you expect them to follow you in return? I'm curious to see what people think about this. Take the poll below, and leave a comment to share your opinion!
I find it interesting that 100% (so far) of your answerers say “no”. When my experience on Twitter is that most people seem to feel that that’s the only reason you SHOULD follow people.
I have put in place a policy where I follow people who talk to me. In other words, if you @htmljenn me in your posts, I’ll follow you. As I want to chat with people who will chat with me. I follow other people, too, but that’s the primary reason I would follow a complete stranger.
I was doing the auto-follow route, but I found that my feed was getting spammed with posts I wasn’t interested in. And contrary to the widely-popular belief, I haven’t found Twitter to be at all useful for “crowd-sourcing”. I ask questions on Twitter that get no response whatsoever, and I have around 400-500 followers. Since I think the majority of those were people who follow just to get followers themselves, it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t reply. And as they figure out that I’m no longer following them, they’ll unfollow me, I’m sure.
If you want to learn about Web Design and HTML and the vagaries of my life with a new baby, then feel free to follow me @htmljenn. If you want me to follow you, then start a conversation with me, or just mention me in an at-reply. I want to be “friends” (as Twitter puts it) with people who really want to be friends, not with people who are obsessed with numbers.
Thanks, Jennifer. That’s exactly what I was wondering. The rule of Twitter etiquette says you should follow people who follow you, but I disagree. I think that’s the rule to follow if you want to bump up your numbers, but it doesn’t add value to the experience. So far the results to this poll (albeit only a few people so far) seem to support my thinking on this topic. I’m hoping to get a lot more votes and responses to get a clearer picture of what Twitter users think about this topic.
I guess that’s why Jenn isn’t following me on my personal account. =}
I personally don’t think it makes sense to automatically follow everyone unless you have a handful of followers or you have no intention of reading your stream. I follow people I think will be interesting, relevant and not annoying. As a result, I have engaging conversations and usually get answers to my questions. That said, some people feel strongly that this is snobby or impolite. My feeling is that you have complete control over your own Twitter destiny so there is no reason to choose a “one size fits all” answer. Don’t like it? You know where the unfollow button is…
If I had a nickel for every spammer that’s followed me in order to fish for reciprocation…
I totally agree with the other comments about quality vs quantity. It’s also a bit like blogs. I mean, I read and comment on a lot of blogs, and I don’t expect them to read and comment on mine. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. I don’t take it as an insult if they don’t.