Being "Nice" on Twitter

Written by on Jun 3 2008

Our whole team has twitter accounts. Steve’s is @stevenbristol and I’m @allanbranch. I like twitter, even though it hurts my productivity, lately I’ve run into a recent situation. Its the timeless question, do I follow this person in return because they are following me? If I don’t follow them will I hurt their feelings?

How this question came up…

I am getting a fair amount of followers and when someone follows me I always look at their profile, if I see their tweets are fun or contain something of value I follow them in return. About once a week I drop a few followers and add a couple and sometimes I go back and follow “old” followers. So thats how I maintain my twitter account. I have a staple of 30 people I follow and then I rotate 40-50 more in and out.

But here’s the problem.

People seem to get offended if I don’t instantly follow them back. Every person I follow I get a notification of their every tweet. I want to hear what they say, its the reason I follow them. If I follow and get notification from 100+ people its a constant productivity killer.

So that leads me to a question

Why follow someone if you’re not going to get notified of their tweet? Is it to make them feel good? Maybe I should follow everyone and only get notifications on some, I don’t like upsetting people.

What’s Better?

Is it better to follow someone and NOT get notifications of their tweets or just not follow them? What reason would you follow someone and not get notifications? Isn’t that a bit fake?

Is there a solution…?

I don’t think so, but follow me if you want to hear my thoughts and bad jokes. I might follow you back, if I don’t, please don’t think I am a jerk.

I’d love to hear how you manage your twitter follower/following activity.

Meet
Allan

Hi I'm Allan,

I wrote the article you're reading... I'm one of the co-founders of LessEverything. I love my family more than breathing and I love creating videos about our family adventures.

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