Business : Twitter - Do you autofollow

One of the challenges with Twitter is how to sort through the noise (and there is a lot of that) and to decide whether to autofollow those who follow you. If you do the noise level will go up as their tweets are added to your stream, There is just more to sort through.

Now, tools like tweetdeck can help and allow you to group sets of contacts and only see the tweets from them. That functionality set me thinking.


When I look at how most businesses work (summarised in this diagram) we look to our suppliers to provide goods, services, knowledge, and experience to us, and then take those things and use them apply our processes and skills to provide outputs to our clients, so that we meet the needs and they want to pay us.

But doesn't that mean that we may want to follow a different group of people than those who follow us. I want to follow the people who can extend the knowledge that I need to meet my clients needs, but I want to be followed by potential customers so that they can experience my output and see that I could meet their needs.

My competitors may seek to follow me to see what I'm up to, and I may want to follow them for the same reason, sometimes that leads to partnerships that might be unexpected so there's can be inadvertent side effects. One of the ways to get my clients and potential clients to follow me is to rely on them automatically following those who follow them and so my action to follow them leads to my desired outcome.

There are other ways though, suppose I follow people they follow and engage in the conversations they are finding interesting, I then become visible, and when you are visible and interesting, you get followed.

So, I've started following businesses that meet my supply needs, to listen to them, to learn, to source new suppliers, and resources. They may follow me back, I'm not worried whether they do or they don't.

I'm actively seeking followers who could be clients, and I'm not necessarily relying on them using autofollow to get their attention.

Twitter is great for random conversations, but within those random conversations you can choose to have a strategy to get the outcomes you need.

That's my current way of working, but what, if you use twitter, are you doing?

ps. If you liked this article and you do use Twitter please also twitter it here -->