Against auto-following back on Twitter

The interesting discussion over at Chris Brogan’s about engagement on Twitter left me unsure where I stood regarding autofollowing. Then something happened that turned me firmly against it.

I don’t autofollow people back who follow me, but to each his own, I felt. The only thing I find disconcerting is when I get a direct message from someone I follow, but discover when I try to direct message them back that they don’t follow me and I can’t DM them. It’s a flaw in Twitter I think that I can’t look at my list of followers and see whether I follow them back or not.

Then, by coincidence, around noon today I happened to follow my 1,000 person on Twitter. Now, the people I follow are a carefully-curated group of real people and organizations whose tweets I actually want to see and who I would want to have a conversation with. I have built this group up gradually since joining Twitter in May 2008.

A funny thing happened next. Within minutes of following the 1,000 person — BOOM, I suddenly got all these new followers — 50 in a few hours — who are all like this guy: “Terrence Watson” a.k.a. @media2AtlantaGA. He has has just 7 tweets yet has managed to get 1,100 followers out of 1700 he is following. He has a web site that has the tagline Cutting edge Internet marketing and social media campaign development company in Atlanta, GA. Utilizing proprietary systems and software applications to acheive top ranking on Google in just a few days. Take a look at his cutting edge site (Screen shot below — I won’t link, but it’s on his Twitter profile) and you’ll see an empty WordPress site with “Hello World!” and “This is sidebar 1″… you get the picture?

I know what’s going on: these poor folks have signed up for some scammy service like boostyourtwitterfollowers.com to help them sell make money fast schemes, multi-level marketing diet supplement programs, and phony SEO baloney. If you are new to the world of social media and internet marketing, please don’t fall for these scams. Following 1,000 is apparently some threshold that these services now recognize me as an easy mark to get their customers more followers. Perhaps folks who follow 1,000 or more people are more likely to autofollow back, and it’s easier to “hide” in a big list and not get pruned off.

I’ve been getting a trickle of phony Twitter followers for a long time, of course, and I simply add them to the Twitter list I made just for them called “Spammer or Scammer.” If they don’t disappear after a while, I will just report them for spam, which expunges them from my follower list. They remain on the Spammer or Scammer black list, tho.

Now, here’s why I’m against auto-following back: If there was no auto-follow back option, there’d be a lot less of this scammy behavior, and Twitter would be an even nicer place.

I still feel it’s your choice what to do since everyone’s situation is different. But if you decide to auto follow back everyone who follows you, be aware you are feeding the Scam-n-Spam beast. If you have a huge following and it is too much to manage, you can always use a validation service like TrueTwit.