10 Reasons Not to Auto-Follow on Twitter

Yesterday I stopped following almost all of my Twitter users.

Why?

After thinking about this long and hard, I decided that auto-following people on Twitter is a waste of time.

Yes I realize that one of the best ways to quickly grow your follower count is to find other Twitter users in your niche and follow their followers hoping for a follow-back.  It’s a great strategy for building up your follower count and it definitely works.

It works so well in fact that I was able to take a test account I setup and build up thousands of Twitter followers for it in a matter of days.  But so what?  Who cares if you have thousands of people following you on Twitter?

What does it really mean?  Besides stroking your ego, what does that number really do for you?

Here are 10 reasons auto-following on Twitter is a waste of time:

(1) High Twitter Follower Counts Don’t Equal Social Proof Anymore – Having 20,000+ Twitter followers doesn’t mean you’re automatically worth listening to.

Auto-follow scripts have made it pretty easy to build up massive follower counts simply by following people in a given niche and having their auto-follow scripts follow you back.

So what though, that number is pretty much meaningless.  None of those people really give a crap what you say.  Most of them aren’t real people anyways.

(2) Following Too Many People Makes it Impossible to Stay On Top Of Tweets – What’s the point of following tens of thousands of people, when there is absolutely no way to ever stay on top of all the tweets.

All the people you actually do care about get lost in all the spam and garbage tweets.  It’s kind of like trying to take a sip out of the fire hose.

Yes there is software you can install to filter out all crap except the small handful of people you actually want to listen to, but if you’re not going to be reading the other ten thousand people, why bother following them in the first place?

(3) Attracting the Wrong Followers – I would rather have 3 followers who actually care about what I am saying on Twitter, than 10,000 followers who auto-followed me with a script and will never, ever read any of my tweets.

All you do when you auto-follow is attract other auto-follower type twitter accounts.

(4) Auto-Follow Will Hurt Your Twitter Relationships – When I first started using Twitter and I had just a handful of people that I was following, I was able to stay on top of all their tweets and engage in meaningful conversations both with regular tweets and through direct messaging.

When I started following 1,200+ people that became impossible.  I totally lost track of the people I actually wanted to listen to in the sea of twitter spam.  Also with all the direct messaging spam all my real direct messages got lost in all the spam, so I missed out on connecting with people who genuinely wanted to connect with me.

(5) Following Tens of Thousands of People is Not Fun – Following a handful of people you actually care about connecting with is fun.  Loading up your Twitter screen and seeing pages and pages of twitter spam is not fun.

(6) Use Twitter to Boost Your Business, Not Your Ego – If used correctly, Twitter can be a very powerful business tool.  It can be a powerful tool to build trust and further establish online relationships with your customers and online friends.

Throwing that away just so you can brag about having a super high Twitter count (of mostly useless Twitter followers) is just an ego trip.

(7) Not Auto-Following Will Boost Your Credibility – If someone has 50,000 followers and is following 50,000 people as well, they don’t have as much credibility as someone who has 50,000 followers and is only following 100 people.

Who would you rather have following you?  Someone who only follows a few very select people on Twitter, or someone who auto-follows every single person that follows them?

(8) Auto-Following Kills Twitter – Imagine if everyone out there had an auto-follow script installed and in a couple years you saw everyone with like 500k following/follower counts on their accounts.

Meanwhile, they’re all ignoring 99.99% of that list using filters and just paying attention to the few dozen people they actually care about.  What’s the point of doing that?  Why not just only follow those few dozen people in the first place?

(9) Auto-Following Kills the Value of Your Follow – What if John Reese, Frank Kern or Oprah started following you on Twitter tomorrow?  Wouldn’t that be exciting?  Of course it would.  Oprah is only following 15 people right now.  Imagine being the 16th person on her list.

Now contrast that with getting a follow from Oprah if she was also following the other 2 Million other followers she has.  Big deal, her auto-follow script just followed you back.  It’s worthless.

By not auto-following, when you DO follow someone they will know that you’re actually interested in hearing what they have to say.

(10) Easier Mobile Twitter Experience – When I first started using Twitter I used to use my iPhone to get the latest tweets.  I could take my dog for a walk and see what people were up to.  It was easy to keep track since I was only following a handful of people.

Then I started auto-following everyone and trying to stay on top of what’s happening on my iPhone became impossible with so many new tweets every second.  It became overwhelming so I just stopped using Twitter on my iPhone altogether.

Yes there are apps out there that may be able to help you create filters so that you only see Tweets from a certain subgroup of people, but what’s the point of that?  If you’re going to ignore 99.99% of the people you’re following, what’s the point of following them in the first place?

This is why I am now abandoning auto-following on Twitter.

I spent about an hour yesterday unfollowing everyone on my list.  I still have to go back and add back the people that I do want to follow.

In some cases I actually prefer to follow certain people via their RSS feed, or as an email subscriber on their list instead of Twitter so if I am no longer following you after yesterday please don’t take it personally – it’s not you, I just had to hit the reset button and start again.

Doing this will hopefully make it much easier for me to be able to provide much more valuable Tweets for my followers, even if I don’t follow every one of you back.