chrisbrogan.com - Latest Comments in Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Doug Braun — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:44:21 -0000

Chris, I wouldn't worry about it. I don't believe in auto-followbacks and all of the headaches they create. A person should follow those who have something to contribute that interests *them*. I even wrote an article about the problems with auto-followbacks: http://thedustpan.com/2010/... ... if it helps to put your mind at ease regarding the issues that you are now leaving behind. :-) Good move.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

BadCreditAutomotive.com — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:24:33 -0000

Yeah - same thing happened to me and drove me nuts.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Cosmedic Dentistry San Diego — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:03:28 -0000

I don't blame you making this decision. For one the auto DM levels are crazy and secondly once your Twitter account gets above the 50K level it is hard to keep up with the daily followers that follow you.

Wendy

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Twitter Adder — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:48:59 -0000

If you can get more twitter followers, then you will be in a very good position to use the twitter marketing to get more buyers. By having more followers, you will be able to have a multiplied effect of your marketing efforts. More and more people will be seeing your updates.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Mariano — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:05:44 -0000

Thanks for posting this Chris. I actually found it because I got a DM from someone this morning about "fun140.com" and I decided to look it up before I followed the link. Thank goodness I did, and thanks for writing about it!

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Erin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:08:21 -0000

I know! I get SO many messages in my DM box and with no bulk delete it's so annoying. I found this tool that lets me bulk delete though and it made such a difference. The only down side is you have to use it in FireFox.

Anyway, it may come in handy if you get too many messages in your DM box and don't have the time to manually delete them. It's called DM Whacker and you can get it here: http://dcortesi.com/tools/d...

Hope that helps.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Mariela Castro — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:56:16 -0000

The Twitter etiquette established that you should follow back who is following you. I don´t agree at all. We should follow people with whom we can establish significant relationships and/or with whom we can learn and grow. Otherwise, this would be a mere competition to get more followers by following no matter who.
The etiquette should be: Follow interesting people who share interesting content. Easy and simple.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Dennis Jernberg — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:59:15 -0000

Oh yeah. Sponsored Tweets are spam, too.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Dennis Jernberg — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:57:39 -0000

I've never autofollowed. I knew it wouldn't be a good idea when I started getting auto-DM spam, from Fun140 it turns out. I unfollowed those accounts, of course. And I routinely get unfollowed by accounts that follow me expecting me to autofollow them (as well as losing spambot accounts).

The day @Scobleizer unfollowed all his followers, I manually culled the accounts I follow. I could do it because I had only 375 follows; it got me down to 350. I'll continue to manually search for and add accounts to follow, but I'll never make the mistake of autofollowing.

Down with Fun140 & spambots!

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Keith Burtis — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:54:13 -0000

Chris, I have taken the same approach. It sucks! Twitter is getting more and more difficult to navigate. persoanlly, I feel the same way with the Sponsored tweets as well. As much as I filter twitter.... I'm not interested in more noise.
-Keith

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

gavinstokes — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:04:58 -0000

Don't despair - we know you love us all :-) To a twitter newbie (me), DM seems a bit broken due to the spam (to auto follow or not to auto follow…), but it's still an interesting, fun experience.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Batman — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:50:39 -0000

Wow. Just wow. I'm glad I'm at a point where I don't have to feel obligated to follow everyone back that follows me yet. You carry a heavy burden, my friend. We should start a campaign to take down @fun140 and other 'bots like it. Don't know if that would be possible....

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Dr Wright — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:25:18 -0000

I got rid of auto follow also. I dont follow people with no pics or pics of body parts that are generally covered in public or tweets about how to make cash with your tweets.

Life is too short to miss the cool stuff on twitter.

Dr. Letitia Wright
The Wright Place TV Show
http://wrightplacetv.com
www.twitter.com/drwright1

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Antone Roundy — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:09:35 -0000

I hope (and expect) that as Twitter matures, people will stop expecting to get followed back by everyone they follow.

I suppose if you use Twitter to chat with your chums, reciprocal following makes sense. But if you use it for information gathering (eg. following thought leaders and info aggregators in your industry), why on earth would you expect it?

Everyone knows that you can't REALLY follow hundreds of people -- at least not if they're tweeting actively.

If someone who's following more than about 75 people follows me (which over 80% of my followers are -- no kidding -- I checked), I figure they're just hoping I'll follow them back so they can market to me. I know darned well they won't be reading MY tweets, so why should I have to wade through their tweets and open myself up to DM spam?

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Christopher S. Penn — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:48:02 -0000

Just use Buzzom and search for your @ replies. Or ask people to use #cbfme as a hash tag and auto-track that.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

gaylehurmuses — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:28:18 -0000

It does get a bit tedious. I especially can't stand the prostitutes that keep sending me cam invitations...I could not possibly be less interested.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Brandon Mendelson — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:15:13 -0000

Totally agree Chris. I am going to follow your lead on this one.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Joe Manna — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:52:31 -0000

It ultimately depends on your audience. For companies, Auto-Follow (reciprocal) is a very beneficial feature to have to permit private conversations between the consumer and the brand to take place.

Auto-following scripts is a big no-no. There is no better way to say "I only care about numbers, not relationships" than Tweeting, "Get 2000 followers in 3 days."

It's my general rule that anyone I publicly reply/mention, I will follow them only in case they want to DM me or somehow actually connect outside of 140 characters. ;-)

But yes, I very much agree with your sentiments, Chris.

~Joe

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Charles LeRette — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:34:53 -0000

Chris, I don't get 500 a day, more like 50, but I use TweetLater's semi auto vetting utility and it takes me about 10 seconds per person. The system automatically selects to ignore people who haven't tweeted in a while, people with no tweets, those with an unusually high following/follower ratio, those with no avatar and a few other parameters you can set. Then for the rest it shows you their latest tweet, their follower/following count, the date they joined, their bio and avatar all on one page.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Charles LeRette — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:30:56 -0000

So if you were standing around minding your own business at a golf course and some strangers asked if you wanted to join their threesome to make it a foursome you'd shout at them for dragging you into their game?

Oh... wait... you were already at the golf course weren't you?. ;)

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Charles LeRette — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:27:46 -0000

Unless I'm not following you I have no idea how your plan works. No one is seeing your general @ reply except for those who are already following you, and maybe a few when it flies by in the general stream, so how is that accomplishing anything?

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

MichelleMacPhearson — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:18:00 -0000

I just don't understand how Twitter is to blame for one's decision to follow anyone who follow you willy nilly? It's a user's responsibility to maintain their circle of "friends" however you choose to define that - if you let folks into your circle with whom you don't actually have a relationship or similar interests, it's not Twitter's fault (of MySpace's, or Facebooks, etc.)

Just because *you* don't care for something doesn't make it spam - clearly lots of folks do enjoy these games.

Also, why are you afraid of peoples reactions and thinking you're a "snob"? It's your job to teach people how to use social media effectively, and as you've found out, auto-follow is not effective. Consider it a teaching opportunity.

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

PurpleCar — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:03:25 -0000

Thanks, Chris! I made the same decision a few months ago. It's a shame. But it is easier to click on every name in my @ replies (mentions) list to make sure I'm following back than it is to sort through all of the spam/spammers. Good luck. -PC

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Rich_Weaver — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:40:50 -0000

I really like your blog! Nice and simple!

Re: Effective Immediately- No More Auto-Follow

Rich_Weaver — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:38:39 -0000

I really like your blog! Nice and simple!