I have read just about everywhere that with Twitter you should just follow everyone who seems even remotely interesting or has the potential to be interested in what you say. You should follow them, then use any of the various Twitter programs out there to unfollow those who don’t follow you within three days. I know I blog about social media a lot, but I can’t stress enough how futile blind following is. It’s like blind querying: Agents tell you not to blindly send out queries. They tell you to carefully select your markets and send letters to those. I feel Twitter, and any other social media, should be the same way. So I don’t blindly follow writers or readers on Twitter. I carefully consider them and their Tweets. If they don’t pose questions or interesting discussion and only spam links, what is the purpose of following them? They’re so wrapped up in their own link spamming that they’re not going to notice me.
Social media is about social interaction. If you find you are not interacting with your followers or your followers aren’t interacting with you, what is the point?
I see authors link spamming their e-books all the time on Twitter. I go to check out their Amazon rankings, only to find that their link spamming is not at all helping their sales. It’s because they’re not treating their followers as people. They’re treating them as commodities to buy their products, and thus killing the human element to this social media thing.
Yesterday I joined a community on Facebook of writers who post their author pages and receive likes in return. I received 36 likes from this page. My hope is that we’re all not simply liking to like but are going to actually interact with these pages that we liked. Or else what is the point if we’re just going to ignore these authors’ postings? I didn’t simply like to like. I liked authors’ pages who engaged well with the fan base and who had books I might be interested in checking out. It doesn’t do me a bit of good to have 85 likes but not a one of them pays attention to what I write. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have thousands of followers but no engagement from them.
So I don’t understand why social media moguls encourage follow spamming. I am very selective about who I follow. I primarily follow people now based on their websites–which mostly occurs from WordPress. I am wary about following people with an enormous follower base because these people usually interact so little with the followers I wonder why they even have a Twitter or a FB or any type of social media in the first place. These people may seem popular at first glance, but a look at their Amazon ranking begs otherwise.
I suppose follower spam is encouraged because you might get lucky and find lots of people who are suddenly interested in what you’re posting. But it’s not working for me to do that. I find those I interact with are interested in me far more than those I try to interact with but won’t interact with me in return.
amberskyeforbes.wordpress.com 
I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes with the perception that quantity somehow equals quality when it comes to things like twitter followers. I am constantly confused by the random people who follow me on twitter. I guess it makes sense if they’re writers (even if their books aren’t to my taste), as I do tweet about reading and writing a lot. But then I get really random followers. Yesterday, for example,I got a new follower that only tweets stock tips. I think I may have tweeted a few times about the economy when it comes to my thousands of tweets, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never tweeted about the stock market. What does he hope to gain from following me?
I get erotica authors and porn people just because my novel is a paranormal romance. I also have rappers following me. What? I never mentioned anything about rap before.
I think rappers follow and then unfollow everyone. Or so it seems.
They’re just annoying because their tweets are really bad. They’re not engaging at all.
I’m still trying to figure out the best way to use Twitter. I feel like my feed is full of spam, and I don’t have a good Twitter client and hate the site itself. This means that it’s hard for me to keep up with tweets and even harder to remember to tweet anything besides my blog posts that automatically get tweeted.
Do you have any advice on a good desktop client for Twitter?
I used to use Tweetdeck because it was quick and smooth and not so slow and bulky, but I haven’t gotten a desktop client for my Surface RT yet. I also recommend getting the ManageFlitter widget. The pro features cost (I don’t have pro features) but I like that I can post a tweet to it and it’ll send that tweet out during a high-traffic time for your particular account. So I have a tweet that is supposed to be going out at 3 PM advertising my website. You can mass unfollow people who are not following you back, but only 100 of those a day. You can also mass follow people, but I would rather not do that.
Thanks! I will look into Tweetdeck and ManageFlitter. And I agree–I don’t want to mass-follow. Too much noise.
THANK YOU. This ticks me off/confuses me (depending on what kind of day I’m having). I follow people’s blogs or twitter because I know them or because I’m actually interested in what they have to say, not because I hope they’ll follow me back (though that’s nice, if they’re interested).