Last week I spoke about how ‘following is a good way to get followers?‘. This is a strategy used by thousands of Twitter users and one that has been proved to work. I’ve seen some Twitter users with 2 or 3 updates and no bio or avatar yet they still have thousands of followers, which just goes to show how effectively this technique can be.

Maki from Dosh Dosh raised a few interesting points last week in his post ‘Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users‘. Specifically he talks about how you should be using Twitter to build relationships and how low-value followers offer no real value.

I have to agree. If someone follows me I do not follow them back if :

• They do not post updates – Seriously, why do people follow people who don’t even update their Twitter account!
• Only post links to their own website
• Don’t actively particpiate with others – Specifically, I am looking for those who engage with other Twitterers in conversation and drop the occasional Retweet too.

Most of the people who I don’t follow fall into one of the above categories and nearly all of them are just looking to promote their website and not develop relationships via Twitter. They are just the same as the people who spam forums with links.

Although I do want to promote myself and my website through Twitter, I don’t believe that the best way is to mindlessly just post links. The most effective way is to make good contacts and help others (this applies to any social site).

Patti Stafford put it better than I could with her comment yesterday saying :

I realize part of Twitter’s purpose is self promotion, but I think people go overboard. It’s a social network, which to me means, being social. If you went to a party to socialize and all you spoke of was your new venture, your book, your website, your product–how many people at the party are going to want to speak to you? More than likely they’ll go find someone else at the party who is actually fun and lively and I try to use Twitter in that way.

Are inactive Twitterers valuable?

Many of the accounts which follow you and do nothing but promote a website are owned by people running automated bots whereas some of them are updated by people who simply do not understand Twitter. However, all of them seem to be using the following to get followed technique and therefore if you don’t follow them back, they will no doubt unfollow you at a later date so that they are not restricted by the 110% follow limit.

So from point of view, you have stopped pointless updates clogging up your dashboard, but from another, you have just lost a follower. This is something that doesn’t concern me. Whilst I want to connect with more people and promote myself through Twitter, I do not want to play the numbers game and go for quantity over quality.

However perhaps I’m wrong. Michael Gray, a blogger I have a lot of respect for, wrote a post 4 or 5 months ago talking about this very subject. He wrote :

So why would you want to profile the thousands of fake friends … to get real friends that’s why…

Michael rightly points out that one of the things which users actively check when seeing who is following them is see :

How many other people are following this person

So is there value in having fake friends? Is it worth following automated bots, self promoting spammers and inactive accounts if your follower count goes up? I’ll put my hands up and admit that I am still unsure.

My first reaction to this question would be no as I am not obsessed with my follower count and I don’t want my dashboard clogged up with pointless self promotion links. However, if following more people means more people will follow me, surely that is a good thing as it increases the chance of getting Good Followers i.e. people I do want to connect with, people who are active in conversations and who are good retweeters. But on the other side of the coin, with a lot of poor followers you could perhaps miss a lot of tweets from good Twitter users because your dashboard is filled with junk.

I’d love to hear your opinion on this so please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the subject