Did you know that how many people you follow versus how many people follow you is an important metric on Twitter? In fact it is so important that if you don’t follow enough people someone may not follow you back.
I’ve seen a few client accounts that we only post tweets to that have several hundred followers but the account only follows one or two other profiles. This wild imbalance may keep others from choosing to follow you.
Personally, I use an automated service to vet my own followers. Due to the size of my own business accounts onTwitter I now don’t follow every one who chooses to follows me. I have become more selective over time due to the size of my accounts and my Twitter klout.
Here’s what I check out via automated settings before I follow someone back on Twitter:
- Was there a tweet done in the last seven days? If you aren’t using Twitter frequently I won’t follow you back
- What is the percentage of followers versus followed. If you have a big difference, I won’t follow you back.
- If you don’t have a real profile photo and are using a generic image or no image at all, I won’t follow you back.
- Is your profile photo showing an image in a bikini? I won’t follow you back.
These are just a few things that I look for before adding an auto-follow on Twitter. Additionally, I will periodically purge my accounts of people who I follow but who do not follow me back. Although I can’t perform an unfollow as an automated action as I did before, I do purge my account periodically.
All these actions help to keep a Twitter account in balance and fairly spam and porn free. I consider these actions just a part of good Twitter account management. There are a number of free and paid tools to use for these actions, but that’s another blog post and one I’ll save for next week!