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| Photo credit: respres on Flickr |
For any of you who use Twitter (and those of you writers who don't, I truly believe you should give it a try), you know exactly what I'm talking about just based off the title of this post: Auto-follow backs.
Every new Twitter user will
quickly come across the question that has many debating and scratching their
heads over—to automatically follow someone back or not?
If you glance at my Twitter
profile for even a second, you'll see pretty clearly based off my follower/following
ratio that I very obviously don’t—but it’s probably not for the
reason you might think. Truth is, I believe that automatically following everyone
who follows you indicates that you’re completely missing the point of social media.
You see, when you ask for more
followers or hound others to follow you simply because you followed them,
you're focusing on the numbers rather than the people. Following people becomes
a game—a race of let's see who can get the most followers the fastest. We
become concerned no longer with the content of our streams or the relationships
we're building—simply the number beneath the "Followers" count on our
profiles.
And from there, it's a slippery
slope. Because the moment you lose sight of the people behind the numbers,
you start to forget what this whole social media thing is all about:
relationships.
I challenge you to look beyond the numbers.
Sure, they're fun to look at every once in a while, particularly at a
milestone, but I challenge you not to lose sight of the greatest gift social
media has to give.
How you decide to do that may differ—for me it
meant only following people back who I've started to create a relationship with—people
who I've carried a conversation with, who I have word sprints with, who are
friendly and greet me in the morning and make a point of reaching out
occasionally to say hello and answering when I welcome my new followers.
Because when you encounter those kind of people
you know that they get it—that you're not just a number, that they're willing
to make the little extra effort to build a relationship with you.
And that's when I click the little blue follow
button to make sure I can connect with them again.
What's your Twitter follow policy? Do you
automatically follow people back? Why or why not?
