Follow back or hold back: The dilemma for businesses on Twitter
After you’ve built a sizeable following for your brand on Twitter, it’s time for a very important decision: do you follow back everyone who follows you?
Clearly, you don’t want to appear churlish. These people have been good enough to publicly give their endorsement of your business by following your tweets, signifying their appreciation of your posted content. However, Fast Company community manager Sheena Medina warns against the dangers of automatically following back:
“Don’t fall into the trap of something I call a ‘courtesy’ follow — that is, following someone that has followed you out of a desire to appear grateful… This does nothing but fill your stream with noise,”
Medina, along with other experts in BA jobs, advises a more selective approach to deciding who to follow and who to simply leave on your follower list. Take the time to investigate the Twitter accounts of those who follow you, picking only the ones that post relevant and useful content that you will naturally want to retweet.
Lead author of Twitter for Dummies Laura Fitton suggests taking an entirely different attitude towards your Twitter following. She espouses a far more inclusive strategy suggesting that you follow everyone back without exception or miss out on establishing important lines of direct communication:
“As a business, not following someone back means you’re telling them, ‘Thanks for your support, but you’re not important enough to us to be willing to listen to you privately.’”
Whether you decide to follow back selectively or without restraint, both Medina and Fitton warn against a policy of giving each follower a generic “thanks for following” message.
Authenticity is the key, as social media users have become adept at spotting an automated response. Far from feeling valued, they will instead feel that they are simply part of the crowd.
Instead, take the time to generate personalised individual responses that will engage your followers once you’ve followed them back, hopefully establishing a valuable and long-lasting Twitter relationship. Laura Fitton said: “Above and beyond that, stuff like retweeting their content, asking them questions and truly listening to their answers, giving them interesting stuff to interact with are all good ways to engage your community.”
As more small businesses become wise to the benefits of investing in building a brand presence on Twitter, more IT jobs UK based will focus on social network community management. Appointing an avid social media enthusiast to keep the Twitter community engaged and feeling valued should be a priority for any business hoping to make the most of their followers.
So whether you follow back everyone or pick and choose, take the time to make a meaningful connection, rather than simply giving a stock response that will sound aloof and not at all welcoming.
