Don Reisinger on Cnet says that you should follow everyone who links to you on Twitter, which is OK advice, but the reality is like any social networking you should have some due care when you do this, not everyone is worth following.
Yesterday I got a note that 4980Boynton was following me on Twitter, and when I went to go look at the person, this was not someone I wanted to follow, it was a twitter spam account, this morning the account had been suspended for bad behavior by Twitter.
While the advice is good, you have to think about what you are doing when you are getting ready to follow someone. Of course there are great people to follow on any system, make your friend, find out more about them and block them later if they are doing things you don’t like. The reality is though, you can save yourself some pain, and a few clicks, a couple of minutes each day by taking a look at what you are doing before you do it. Blanket follows usually end up with some interesting things happening, and if the person you are following randomly starts talking about things that can get you into trouble, well then, you have to think about it before you blindly follow.
This is even more important if your co-workers or managers have access or know about the twitter account. They unfortunately, will associate the people you follow with you. This is based on the premise that Like = Like when we really know that it is not Like = Like (Like !=Like). At times and especially with twitter spam the desire is to get as many people following you for the big spam splurge that will come later in the game. There is also a little Google Juice mixed in with that, and unfortunately Twitter Spam is a fast growing problem.
You can help solve the problem by reporting, blocking, and not following people who are engaged in Twitter Spam, or shady behavior. You control your reputation by who you link to, if your twitter account is a mix of personal and professional, then you do need to be careful who you link to.
Tags: twitter, spam, twitspam, danger will robinson, danger, careful, social networking
One other thing is do you want every one following you? I banned one follower because he looked like a spammer.
Jesse Stay, who runs SocialToo, and I have been talking about the issue of auto-following spammers. One of the most common criteria is that these spammers follow you and then unfollow in a day or two. I was seeing that more than 50% of my daily unfollows were from people who had signed up that very day!
So… he went to work and a new feature has been added to SocialToo, whereby you can unfollow people who follow and then unfollow in a short amount of time.
Check out the blog post:
http://blog.socialtoo.com/2009/01/10/fight-twitter-spam-with-unfollow-filters/
As for auto-following, it comes down to how you use Twitter. I don’t spend much time in the main feed. I prefer search and replies. So it doesn’t really matter much if I am following 1,000 or 10,000.
If I auto-followed everyone, I would be completely swamped and I only followed 300 people. I think that without any filter controls, its hard to get a value out of it. Searching though cuts out this problem, like Louis said.
Hello,
Interesting reading. I agree with you that you should not auto follow everyone on twitter. It is something that I don’t do actually. However, you can save yourself a lot of time, just by reading their timeline and their profile. What do they talk about, what are their interests, look at their website. I am not sure if this is what you are referring to when you talk about “by taking a look at what you are doing before you do it.” Yesterday I actually came across an interesting thing when I was on twitter. I added some people who I considered interesting regarding social media. After following some people I noticed that I was being added by others. I added about 15 followers yesterday by adding about 10 people. Most of the new followers were people who described themselves as someone who were helping companies with social media. I followed some of them after I looked over their sites, saw they had more people following them and were talking about things that interested me. I noticed today that they have unfollowed me. My guess is that they have some auto follow based upon when someone they think is interesting is followed. This is just my guess though. I do disagree that people would be based upon who you follow from your co-workers and managers. Why would a co-worker or manager base anything on who you follow on Twitter? They would have to research who the person is that you are following, what their intentions were with being on Twitter, etc. As long as it doesn’t affect the company in a negative way, I don’t see this as important. I understand what you are trying to say, but I don’t think it is as important as it seems. I work in a high technology field where most of my co-workers are on Twitter and I know they couldn’t care less who I follow. Thinking of some of the other companies I have worked with they probably have never even heard of Twitter. I do get the point though and agree with you and that is, don’t just do something with out doing some research. Very good article and very thought provoking.
Mike Riley
I’m quite new to Twitter. Registered about 6 months ago, but never got busy with it until this weekend, reading various etiquette and “how to” posts. It struck me from the beginning that Twitter, like most things, reflects what you put into it. I have been so pleased by the usefulness of my early followers’ web sites and Tweets. I started big, following five or six highly ranked Twitterers(?) and from there, each time I get word that I’m being followed I quickly 1-read the upper right corner bio, and 2-visit the website, and 3-look over the recent tweets. It doesn’t take long. If I can’t find anything that makes me go “aha!” or commonality with my interests, I’ve refrained from following. But that has only happened in very few cases. The idea of auto-following dilutes the strength of Twitter for me…at least so far on my learning curve. Thx. Write On.
Allison Majure (@JustWrite)