If you follow me on Twitter, I won't follow you back. But here's why

Hypestar has ~1,000 followers on Twitter, and some of them, we follow back. I have the same practice on my own Twitter account. The reciprocal approach of [arbitrarily] following people back is, in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes people make on Twitter.

The beauty of Twitter is its asynchronous relationship - this means that the connection can exist in one direction, but does not need to exist in the other. This is why it's called "Following" rather than "Connecting"; I can follow you, but you don't have to follow me back.

So why would we want that?

Well, I may find you interesting, you may talk about Japan - and I may be a keen traveller. This is a great fit, what you talk about, I enjoy - so I subscribe to your posts and my timeline receives your 'words of travelling wisdom'. Meanwhile, I talk about social, technology and food - and you may not be interested in that. And you know what? That's fine - that's the point of the asynchronous relationship. You choose not to follow me, because you're not interested in what I have to say.

When you start applying caveats to your following, you're doing it wrong. You're following for the wrong reason, and you're basically telling me that you're not interested in what I have to say, but merely whether I follow you back, or not. And that sends a very clear message (and not a good one).

When people choose to interact with you, they will invest in you, your product or your brand. This is key - when I follow you, I am making a commitment - in you, your product or your brand. What sort of commitment are you making to me if you [only] follow as many people as you can?

So why won't you follow me back?

I may, but what I'm saying is that I won't follow you just because you've followed me. What I will do, is check out your profile, I will see what you talk about, I'll click the link in your bio - and if there's value-add content for me, absolutely I'll follow you; but if not, you shouldn't be offended.

Imagine you are talking to 10 people in a room, they're interested in you because they've chosen to enter that room, to stay, to listen to you, to engage with you. Let's take those 10 people and sprinkle them across the capacity crowd in a football stadium - out you come with your value-prop at half time, you're giving your all...except, your audience is drowned out by the white noise of the crowd, they can't hear you properly - you can't even see them. But still.....you've got a huge following though, right?

It really doesn't matter how many people are following you - or at least, your engagement rate is far more critical. If you've got 23 followers, but you're moving 25% of them to do something - buy, advocate, convert - this is far more powerful and useful to you than having 49k followers, but with most of them not listening.

Following isn't enough anymore - talk to me

One thing that really stands out to me, is engagement - I love it. We try and thank every single person (account) that follows Hypestar on Twitter, and you know what, the majority just ignore our "Hey, thanks for following!" little nod. Some 'Like' the Tweet, that's always appreciated.

But some....some talk to us. They reply with something like "Hey! You're welcome, I saw your article on 'X' and thought I'd follow you. I do a similar thing, perhaps we could chat sometime?" and that really gets my attention.

It's engagement that stands out these days - and it's a relationship that we're looking to create and develop, so starting a conversation is really a sure-fire way of getting noticed - for the right reasons.

Accounts that have a huge number that they're following are also something that just seems a bit 'bleh'. Once I see the notification, I check out the account and see that this account follows 50,000 people (and probably have 49,592 followers). Straight away I'm wondering how I'm going to be heard over the noise of the other thousands of people they're following.

Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are a potential option to address some of this. Used correctly, they can be incredibly powerful. Lists allow you to currate your community by sub-categorising them based on criteria you choose.

So, you could follow a few thousand people - probably already too many to really 'keep up with', but if you take those folks you're following and place them in lists, then when viewing that feed (either in Twitter or a social dashboard like Hootsuite), you are viewing only the Tweets from the members of that particular list.

For example, Hypestar maintains a list of accounts that are part of our HypeXpert series. This allows us to monitor these accounts and what they're saying closer than if we were just following them.

Couple of things to remember with this, Lists can be Public or Private. As you imagine, public lists are visible by all, accounts added to a public list will be notified, the name, the members are both visible to all and anyone can subscribe to them. Private lists, by comparrison are secret to you - members of those list are not notified, and no one can see them (so, whether you choose to have a private list of your business competitors, or all your exes; they won't know).

If you want to follow @HypestarUK or @JamesLaneMe on Twitter - it would be great to hear from you. But don't just follow, come say hello...come join our community.