While I was scrolling through my new Twitter follower’s this morning I came up with this idea for a blog post.  

How many of you take time each day to see who your new followers are and decide whether to follow them back? Or, do you just follow everyone back?

In my opinion it pays to keep an eye on who you are following, and who unfollows you.  You can check out a previous post on the tool I use to look at all this sort of information, 5 Ways to Analyse Twitter with SocialBro.

But this blog post is all about Twitter profiles and what to look for when deciding who to follow.  First though, a little quiz (the answers are at the bottom), out of the following 10 Twitter followers, which ones did I follow back?  Put your answers in a comment before checking your answers.

1.

 

2.

 

3.

 

4.

 

5.

 

6.

 

7.

 

8.

 

9.

 

10.

 

Without giving away just yet which ones I followed back I want to just go over the things I look for when deciding whether to follow or not.

Am I interested in any of the information they have provided in their profile?

The first thing I look at is whether this person interests me, as a general rule I tend to follow back all authors and writers because this is the niche of my business, and books interest me. If they are neither authors or writers, then I check for other interests such as France, cooking, pets etc… If they come across as normal people who tweet normal things that interest me then I follow back.

Do we have something in common?

Similar to the above, if we have interests or business goals in common it’s likely I will follow back.

Could they be a potential client?

This is a difficult one because everyone could be a potential client. If someone sounds normal, has a genuine sounding profile and I am interested in what they have to say then I follow back. Sometimes I will look at the last few tweets they have made if I’m really not sure, that usually confirms whether I follow or not.

Does the profile contain any hashtags such as #teamfollow or similar?

This may be personal opinion, but I really hate it when people use these hashtags in Twitter profiles, it’s even more likely I won’t follow you if you have this stupid hashtag in your profile.

Do I know what this person tweets about?

I like to know by just reading the profile what this person tweets about, if it’s not clear then I will have a look at the last few tweets, and if it’s still not clear I don’t follow back. You can see one of my examples above is in a language I don’t even understand, so there is no reason why I would follow someone when I won’t even understand their language… oops given that one away!

Do they have the default profile image?

If you have the default egg image as your profile picture it’s usually a sure fire way of me not following you back. There are exceptions to this rule of mine, one is personal friends/family who don’t know much about Twitter to begin with, I let them off for a while. Another is those people who explain the reason they use the default image such as one of my followers the other day, she had set-up a new account and was preparing an image for this new account. Explanations go a long way…

I hope that’s given you some ideas about what you can look for on Twitter if you’re constantly umming and ahhing about who you should and shouldn’t follow. In fact as I was writing this I realised that I did some similar posts last year, which you can check out here (I don’t think my rules have changed much) – 5 Followers NOT to Follow on Twitter! and Who do you Follow on Twitter?

And here are the answers… (really small so you can’t cheat easily!)
3, 5, 8, 10

Share This
https://joharrison.rocks/twitter-follow-back-rules/
joharrison.rocks
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-17
70086
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZOU3I2RP7EL4UT3QBROZH3ETKEYFIMJL
<urn:uuid:d7d337b7-00a6-403d-8ea8-9831577691d7>
2021-04-21T03:07:58Z
77.72.1.21
text/html
sha1:BWLKJZFFWGK4ERJTHGDRB3BVKNMUYUH3
<urn:uuid:c1bc6d2f-d3da-4d5d-8be4-68c7cb8359aa>
https://joharrison.rocks/twitter-follow-back-rules/
response
<urn:uuid:5ba784f0-c00f-43cb-a482-c9a3f726e997>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-17
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-88.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/