Pages

Thursday, April 7, 2016

100% Follow Back; Yes Or No?

Since I've come back to blogging, and mostly Twitter, I've seen a lot of commotion about this '100% Follow Back' and '#MReTweet' trend. A fellow follower asked me a question about the whole concept. I said I didn't quite understand the idea, but my understanding was that if you followed someone who was on a 100% Follow Back list, they would follow you back, no matter what. They said it sounded like a great way to boost numbers and gain followers, and it does. Finally, I said that if this retweet, follow back concept was content based, I would be all over it. 

That was when I really started thinking about it. Though it sounded like a great idea at first, the more I thought about it, the more turned off I became. As I'm fairly new to Twitter, I have about 200 followers and I follow just under 150 people, so far. I receive about 10-15 followers a day when I'm really active. As a writer, the 150 people I follow are people whose content I actually enjoy reading, retweeting and promoting to my fellow writers, bloggers, followers, etc. The people that I follow are people that I support and agree with. 

Ive seen the lists for 100% follow back go up to 500; five hundred people who swear that if you follow them, they will follow you. No questions asked. I find this concept dizzying! 

Think about it; if you follow every singlen person on that list, that's an extra 500 people. That could mean 500 very different posts every day, at least! Some people post 5-10 times a day on Twitter! Sometimes even more. Sure, that's a 'so-called' guaranteed 500 followers (if they don't unfollow you in a few days when they think you won't notice one missing follower), but what happens to your content? What happens to your feed when you're a writer liking and retweeting something that's completely irrelevant to your usual content? It becomes messy! Sure, maybe after 500 followers it won't matter; your feed will already be a mess, overflowing with hundreds and hundreds of tweets a day. 

While I get giddy and squeal like a school girl every time I get a new follower, at least I know that these new followers are following me for the right reasons. Each follower has decided to follow me for a reason, and that reason has something to do with the content I post, the content I chose to share with them, the people I chose to retweet and promote. And honestly, it's all relevant. It's reliable! You can guarantee that content like that will be consistent. If I start posting about ponies, people are going to stop following me because that wasn't what they followed me for. They followed me and developed expectations based on what I posted at the time they followed. 

Honestly, I feel the follow back trend cheapens the experience, the purpose of Twitter. Maybe it's just me; as a new writer to Twitter, I want to follow people based on their content, content that I enjoy reading. I also want my followers to follow me because I intrigued them, made them think, and they enjoyed reading what I had to say. I don't want to cheapen the experience by submitting myself and promising to follow back every single person who follows me. At least when I follow you or follow you back, you know that I chose to. I didn't do so out of obligation. I didn't pledge to treat you the same as every other person on Twitter. I saw something I liked, read something I enjoyed and decided I wanted to see more! I can't speak for whoever created Twitter, but I would think that was what they had in mind. 

What do you think? ReTweetTrain, yes or no? Good or bad? Right or wrong? As always, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, take a moment to share, have any thoughts, leave a comment below or tweet at me @TresaWriter and let me know what you thought! 

2 comments:

  1. I agree with you, choosing who to follow is important and getting new followers based on my content is still exciting. I closely monitor my feed because I feel it's a reflection on myself. Unfortunately, the new Twitter algorithm that decides what I want to see makes this harder -- I can scroll for up to 20 minutes before I find the actual latest posts. I don't have time for that every day, so now I'm being even more choosy about who I follow. And I've even started to block people from following me if I find myself at odds with their content. I've gotten a couple of passive-aggressive notes from people I didn't follow back or blocked, but if they think that's going to change my mind, they're totally wrong.

    Nice article -- I really enjoyed it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

      I agree with your agreement. I don't want to be at a place where I've lost sight of the content I actually enjoy seeing. I don't want to cheat just to achieve a higher following. At least I can count on the people that do follow me to always like and retweet my posts.

      Again, thanks for weighing in!

      Delete