Chris Hutchins

To Auto-Follow or Not: Managing Your Twitter Stream

Just like most of the people reading this post, I use Twitter quite a bit (@hutchins). In the last few weeks I’ve noticed that the number of followers I have on Twitter has starting to pick up quite a bit (see why here). Anyways, it has left me in the middle of a major Twitter decision: does one follow everyone that follows them (auto-follow) or not.

As I often do with most decisions I looked at the pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s:

• It’s polite (I kinda feel like a bad person when I don’t return a strangers follow)
• Won’t miss DM’s
• Expand your network
• More tweets in your Twitter stream = more chances to learn something new / interesting

Con’s

• Irrelevant tweets in your Twitter stream
• Makes it difficult to stay on top of your closest friends’ tweets
• Opens the door to twitter / DM spam (especially annoying if you get SMS notifications for DMs)
• According to twitterratio.com, it would give me a friend-to-follower ratio closer to 1.0 and thus make me less “popular”

As for now, I’ve adopted a policy of checking each user’s tweets before deciding to follow them (for spam and type of content). However, in the long run (once I get more followers / day) it might be more worthwhile to auto-follow than spend the time to check out each user.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

(Twitter graphic courtesy of Smashing Magazine)