Just curious, do you follow everyone who follows you on Twitter (automatically or manually)? Or do you apply some criteria to who you follow back?
I turn on the setting in Twitter so I get an email anytime someone starts to follow me and I look at the profile of everyone who does. I got this one today and had to laugh. I sure hope @nathanaelwang isn’t looking for any follow back!
Social networking is about engagement and conversation. If your conversation is one way (either all talking or all listening) it isn’t going to work for very long.
I’d love to hear some feedback about what criteria you use before you decide to follow someone back on Twitter or accept a friend request on Facebook.
I have two accounts on twitter.
One I use to accept any and all and in reality only ever use it to RT for competition entries and the like. My main one (@stubbyd) is the one I use to interact with.
As for criteria – yes I have some, though I can’t say they are concrete but loosely come into … are you someone of interest to me (be that my faith, my job, my passions) in which case I’ll almost certainly follow you or add you to one of my lists.
Those that get dropped are constant spewers of the same tweet or folks that constantly look to put others down or that speak a language I don’t. I try not to discriminate based on their use of language or their beliefs but do check the quality of their tweets.
Thanks for the feedback Stuart. On the surface it seems like a funny question, but as the different social networks become more popular it seems like there are more and more questionable followers and it forces us to have to ask it.
Recently I’m being more convicted about how the church can reach out to everyone in their local community – especially with Twitter. Probably a future post in a couple weeks about that.