Twitter follow-backs: the 5-step lightning approach.
Lately I’ve been handling a lot more follower notifications for the Hoover’s Twitter account and for my personal account. This is both good news and bad news.
- Good news: Hey, all these new people are following us!
- Bad news: Ick, what’s with all the spammers and other gross types?
I’ve never used auto-follow — and in fact strongly oppose its use — and I’ve never thought it made sense to follow back every single tweeter who follows you. That means reviewing new Twitter followers manually and deciding whether to follow them back one by one, which can be time-consuming if you let it.
At the request of a Twitter acquaintance, I laid out my simple, five-step approach to handling Twitter follow-back decisions quickly and in bulk. Here we go!
Step 1. Set up an inbox filter to shunt all Twitter follow messages into one folder.
Both Outlook, which I use for the @hoovers account, and Gmail, which I use for my personal account, make it easy to set up filters. You want to fix it so that you only see or think about Twitter followers at defined intervals. Otherwise, the trickle of notifications can clutter up your inbox and drive you crazy.
Step 2. Check your Twitter folder only once per day. This does two things for you:
- It allows you to take advantage of batch processing, which is one of the key tactics you ought to be using across all of your work for getting more done.
- It makes it simple to put a one-day lag in your follow-back decisions. This is useful because some bad tweeters, in a misguided effort to swell their follower numbers, will follow many new accounts each day, hoping to get automatic follow-backs. They then unfollow the accounts that don’t follow back quickly. Waiting even one day will let you see clearly which of the people who followed you have already unfollowed.
Step 3. When you do check the folder, you can delete any notices for accounts you obviously don’t want to follow back. It could be, for example, because the account has never tweeted:
It could be because the name on the account is nasty (”&^%$ Videos is following you”) or otherwise offputting (”GetRichNoEffort is following you”).
Step 4. Each follower e-mail from Twitter includes a link to that follower’s Twitter biography page. Just right-click on that link to open each page in a new browser tab.
Note that this doesn’t work well if you’re going straight from Outlook, since it’s going to want to open a new window for each link. For this reason, I access Outlook via Internet Explorer — or, even better, Google Chrome — for this task only. (Takes ten seconds, saves lots of time in the long run.)
Step5: Cycle through the browser tabs, making your individual follow-back decisions as you go. Since you’re on the person’s Twitter page, it’s easy to see their biography (or lack of one), their ratios of following / followers / updates, and the content and timing of their most recent 20 tweets. Simple!
Finis.
Twitter users: What am I leaving out? How do YOU handle follow-backs?
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17 Comments so far
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Excellent post! I had turned off follow notifications until Twitter started sending out the HTML versions (which reset my preferences, grrr…) And my policy at that time was to not even look at any new follows. I figured if I had a new follower who would engage me in a conversation, I would follow them. Since I started receiving notifications again, I have been looking at them and like you, only once a day, quite often a day or two later.
What I would really like to see though is Twitter placing the users whole bio (or as you said, lack thereof) in the emails as well. That would make it even easier to do a first run pass on who’s page I actually want to see more about. I think this would cut down even more, perhaps 25%.
Personally I recommend this service that sends you a daily email with both new followers and recent unfollowers as well.
http://twitapps.com/follows/
It shows you the number of people each user is following, and the number of people who are following them, as well as their location. It does not show the number of updates, that would be nice.
However using this I can easily ignore any with weird usernames, any with no location, any with strange follower or following numbers.
At that point it’s easy to click through to only the ones you care about seeing.
The benefit of seeing the folks unfollowing you is that you’ll start noticing all the people who were just looking for a reciprocal follow back. They’ll follow you and a few days later unfollow.
Great tips, Tim. I’m not sure how we ever managed without filters and folders in email.
The only time I follow back immediately is if it’s someone I actually know and wasn’t following — new to Twitter, etc. Otherwise I wait a few days. This is for my personal account. If I were doing it for a company, I’d act sooner but still wait a day or two to see if they go away as you mentioned.
But I do have a related question. I know people who are adamant about blocking attempted follows by spammers or other icky types. I’m not sure I see the point of taking the time to block them. That may be more engagement than they’re worth. Am I missing something?
I’ve simply shut off the flow of emails from my Twitter. The only emails I get are about DMs. The follower count was getting too overwhelming for me to do anything else.
Good thoughts, all — and thanks for the pointer about TwitApps, Jeff. My system works well enough for me at this point, though I do take your point about unfollows.
Brenda — I also shortcut the process if someone I know follows one of my accounts — especially if they’re new to Twitter.
As for taking the time to block accounts, I only do it when it’s obvious spam.
Oh, this is so smart. Last piece to a strategy I’d been working thru on my own.
I’d already decided to quit following back every single person who followed me. Found a lot of them were game players who didn’t stick around very long. Leaving me with an overly-high, unrequited “following” count.
So now, once a day, I look at all of them and follow ONLY those who appear to have a good balance btween following/followers AND who have some connection to my interests. Otherwise, I let the rest follow as long as they like.
Love the idea of using mail filters. That hadn’t occurred to me, nor the idea of a one-day lag time. Great stuff.
Good tips, Tim. I have a GMail filter that does pretty much the same thing – plus marks them as read and adds a label. I go through every couple days and block the spammers.
And Brenda, if no one blocks them, then twitter won’t know to suspend their account… that’s the only reason I do it.
Elaine — If you find yourself with lots of unrequited followers, you can use http://friendorfollow.com/ to review them systematically. I use it periodically (once or twice a month, maybe) to weed through these.
Stuart’s flow and notifications aside, where’s the value in wanting to know who is following you?
Lately, I’m thinking a lot like Ashton Kutcher. A million people are following him. He’s not receiving those notifications nor does he care. Those are his fans. No different than a business’ fans, or your personal fans.
Followers = fans.
Once you accept that, you don’t need to see notifications. People will engage with you when they feel inspired, and you will then know about them. Likewise, you can use tools like http://tweepsearch.com to search your followers.
But being notified? I don’t get it.
I use tweetlater to vet followers.
It throws up stats of the person, bio, last tweet and also details in percentage of block, ignore and follow.
It helps hugely.
Ari, the experience of most tweeters can’t help but be very different from Kutcher’s. For *him*, followers = fans. For many other people with much smaller audiences, followers could mean other things entirely. From what I know about your use of Twitter, your own experience is also substantially different from most people’s: you built much larger following and follower lists than most people ever do, and then you radically changed the way you went about following people. Mind you, there’s no negative judgment implied in what I say — there are many good ways to use Twitter — but your experience has been different than most people’s.
Beyond that, in a business setting there *can* be great value in wanting to know who is following you. In the case of JetBlue, there may not be great insight lurking there, because they already know that their audience consists of actual and potential JetBlue passengers. But once you drop down below the mass level of the JetBlues and the Home Depots, there are plenty of smaller business Twitter accounts (like, say, Hoover’s) that *do* benefit from knowing exactly who is following them, because some of those follows might not be passive “fans,” but rather actual/potential customers who can be cultivated one on one.
Thanks! Love this strategy and plan to add the Outlook filters.
I would like to add to your response to Ari …
With our followers, we care who they are because it allows us to have a two-way conversation with like-minded people. We support creative entrepreneurs, so it is important to us to know who they are and what they’re saying in order to support their needs. If they follow us and we don’t know about them, or don’t take the time to learn about them, then what’s the point? Then it’s just us blabbing; there’s no interaction.
Just like Tim said, your followers could be potential customers, and you will provide them a better service if you know what their needs and challenges are.
But I guess all of this is irrelevant if you are on Twitter just for fun and for more personal reasons than professional ones. And that’s OK too of course.
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