Twitter Rant

The other night, I came across some software called Brut Force SEO Twitter Smackdown.

One of the features of this software is as follows:

At certain pre-set times, Smackdown will poll your account, and remove any people who haven’t “Followed You Back”. This automatically removes the “Deadwood” from your list and allows you to get MORE subscribers

And this really ruffled my feathers.

You see, I don’t auto-follow anyone on Twitter. I have a folder in my email that all the Twitter follow email messages go to and I personally view each one and decide who I will follow back or not.

My philosophy is, I don’t expect everyone I follow to follow me back and I don’t feel the need to follow everyone who follows me. I follow folks who meet one or more of these criteria:

• I know them personally
• I find their tweets entertaining
• I find their tweets interesting
• I think they might be a potential JV partner
• I think they might be a potential client

So, when I get a chance, I go through each follow message and decide to follow that person or not.

Then I started noticing something. I would follow someone who followed me and then get another message that the person was following me. At first, I thought it was a fluke.

Then I realized that these folks were unfollowing me because I took too long to follow them back.

From my point of view, why the *&^%# are you following me if the only reason is to have me follow you? That seems insane to me.

This is really annoying because now my email box is filling up with re-follows and if I don’t recognize the name or icon, I waste my time going to their profile to see if I want to follow them or not only to find I’m already following them!

Erg.

I guess my essential question here is, why is someone deadwood just because they didn’t follow you back? What’s the point?

Maybe someone out there can make sense of this for me. If so, please post a comment and help me make sense of this madness!