The beauty of Twitter is that you are allowed to follow anyone you’d like. And anyone can follow you. Unlike most other social networks, there is no requirement to reciprocate follows.
However, the entire concept of Twitter is foreign to most people. It’s not a valuable microblogging platform as initially intended. Nor is it effective as a popularity contest. Rather, it’s a powerful communication tool. And is only as effective as the level of trust and authority your followers associate with you. Let me repeat that:
Twitter is only as effective as the level of trust others associate with you.
But with most people misunderstanding Twitter, they look at what others are doing. And what they have found over these past few years is that people with large follower numbers notoriously have equal or greater following numbers.
Seeing these inflated numbers, the majority of Twitter users interested in an expansive following blindly follow back every follower they receive. Or they may have adopted software that automatically follows whoever follows them as well as searches for & automatically follows new people. In their strategy, a follow gets a follow, no questions asked. Nor any engagement needed.
As a matter of fact, the well known Twitter advocate Chris Brogan once employed this strategy. However, he said no to this autofollow strategy in 2009, but it was to late. He had already accrued too large a number of people he was following (as of this post, he follows around 138,000 people). And now he has a heck of a time managing it all.
The autofollow has created a false idea for most Twitter users. And have even given rise to large groups of people (eg. #teamfollowback) who follow you if you follow them. But the second you unfollow, their software instantly unfollows you. This does not build trust nor authority.
The Long-Term Flaw of the Auto-Followback
We all have our specialties and expertise. And we all have our interests.
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