When someone follows you on Twitter, should you follow them back? For individuals the answer can vary wildly depending on the person, but my advice boils down to “follow people back you would be interested in hearing from in private.” You’re giving them the ability to DM you – a more personal form of contact than a public reply.
For businesses it is a lot simpler – or at least I thought. My advice for brands on Twitter was to always follow back every person who follows you. If a customer wants to engage with you on Twitter, let them! They may have questions about your product or service, and want to DM the person behind the account. There’s also a level of personal respect to following someone back that says you value the time it took for them to track you down and follow you.
So, when I asked in Twitter last week about tools that would automatically follow people back, I was surprised to get feedback that some people felt it was a problem. The best reason raised was that automated bots on Twitter would get a free follow-back from you. Since any spam they generate your way are quickly handled with a Mark As Spam in Tweetdeck, this seems easily handled.
The problem others had was that it seemed like an impersonal interaction from a company. They would rather have a human follow people back, even if they didn’t send individual messages. I think this is a point where the ideal of personal interaction can safely give way to the practicalities of time savings.
You’ll get no argument from me that there needs to be a person behind a brand Twitter account to engage, but this is simply automating what can otherwise be a time consuming task – especially for people managing multiple accounts. Even the human behind the scenes can use a bit of help.
Overall, most people I spoke with seemed to agree. Here are some of the tools that came up for either automatically following people back or bulk-reciprocating.
- SocialToo – SocialToo helps you manage Twitter and Facebook and unclutters your stream and Social Graph.
- TwitIn – Flush, Grow, and Reciprocate your followers. Part of Buzzom.
- Tweepi – Tools to allow you to clean up your Twitter account from spammers and deadbeat users, as well as make sure you
- Huitter – A bulk tool for managing your followers and who you follow.
I’ve only just started delving into them, so if anyone has any insight into them I’d love to hear.
