Do You Use Twitter Auto Follow? 3 Reasons Why You Should not

Posted by Ramkarthik | Posted in twitter | Posted on 04-12-2008

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Update: Jesse Stay, who is the founder of socialtoo – the site that offers the twitter auto follow service, posted a reply in the comments of this post and also in friendfeed share (posted by Louis Gray of Louis Gray.Com). SocialToo also offers auto unfollow option, which I forgot to mention in this post. Please see this friendfeed share for more information.

Twitter is becoming famous everyday with so many people joining. You can find me in twitter here – Ramkarthik. All the new users need twitter followers to make sure their words are noticed by some people. Every twitter user likes to have many followers. Sometimes people don’t spend time to learn about twitter and spam the place. In this post you’ll find why you shouldn’t use twitter auto follow.

People, who join twitter, add the ones they know. Later they start to add new people. There is nothing wrong with this. But when people get over excited about twitter, they start following too many people in a single day or spam the community with tons of links.

Coming to talk about twitter auto follow, it is a service that let’s you follow twitter users automatically, once they follow you. Any person, who follows you, will be followed back automatically. You do not have the option of selecting whom to follow.

twitter auto follow
Image Soure: Twitter Influence by mil8

Here are 3 reasons why should not

1. All Links And No Real Update
There are twitter users who post every link of their blog post and do nothing much other than that. They add people in bulk; say 2000 twitter users at once. When you use twitter auto follow, you will be automatically following them. Why would you want to read tweets with links to blog posts all the time? If the profile created is on the name of a blog, you can expect them to tweet only blog post links. But some twitter users have their own names and do only blog promotion in twitter. I’m not saying that these people are bad. It is just that they haven’t understood twitter properly and will take time for them to learn about it.

2. Irrelevant Tweets
When you follow everyone who follows you, you are not using twitter efficiently. Let me give you an example. You have a blog probably (If you are new to blogging, I recommend you to read this free ebook). Even if you don’t have, assume that you own one. You write good blog posts and people are reading it. They subscribe to your blog. Will you subscribe to all of your subscribers’ blog? Of course not. If it was that way, Darren Rowse would have to subscribe to 7000 blogs, even if one tenth of his subscribers have a blog. So to make your twitter page relevant, follow only people who talk about things that interest you.

3. Follow And Unfollow
Twitter users who want to have many followers, add many twitter users. Once you follow them back, after a couple of days, they unfollow you. What’s the disadvantage here? Well, you followed a user because he/she followed you and now they have unfollowed you. When you are using auto follow, you automatically follow these people who unfollow users once they have added them. To avoid this, you should stop using auto follow, wait till the twitter user tweets you or tweets something interesting and then add him/her. Sometimes, you cannot avoid people by doing this too. You should start using Qwitter which will help you to know, who the users that are unfollowing you are.
Do you use auto follow? Why do you use auto follow? If you have valid points, I’ll include it in the next post. We could write a post on the advantages of using twitter auto follow. Please share your views in the comments.

P.S: Don’t forget to add me in twitter. My user name is Ramkarthik.

P.P.S: The link to the free report is an affiliate link.