If you’ve been on Twitter for any good length of time and gathered a few followers, you’ve probably already heard the term “Follow me and I’ll follow you” or “Follow me, I follow back”.

According to some people, this is the unwritten rule of Twitter, that it’s not just rude, but down right wrong not to uphold.

I’m going to tell you why that just simply is not true.

My stalker does not interest me

Ok so, I don’t really have a stalker that hides in the bushes and follows my every move but if I did, I imagine that it would be a lot like having a Twitter follower.

Every picture I tweet, every emotion I tweet, every bowel movement (yes, some people tweet those.. not me, of course… ), you get the idea… your followers are following you. They’re interested in what you have to say.

Now, just because someone follows you, that doesn’t mean that you’d have any interest in them. Let me give you an example.

I have a Twitter account focused on autism. I mean, focused. It’s all I talk about with that account. Now, I get some followers that have an interest in autism but have never once tweeted about autism. Some of them are sports nuts, some are students, some talk about internet marketing… oh so many of them are all about internet marketing. Anyway…

Those people have never once tweeted anything that I’d be interested in as an autism advocate. So why would I follow them? Because of some unwritten rule about how it’s rude?

As an autism advocate, I am better served to have an all autism related list of people I follow so that I can learn from them, read the news they tweet and discuss sciences and experiences with them. If I have a list of 500 autism advocates and 150 of them do not discuss autism, my list becomes diluted and hard to get through.

Some apps provide filters and searches but seriously, that’s not going to do the job. I want to read about my topic of choice, I want to talk about my topic of choice. It’s great that people follow me if they have an interest in what they tweet but I will not follow back when I have no interest in what they tweet.

Following is so 2008….  now we have lists!

Using the same examples, let’s say I have a bunch of followers that are into hockey. Now, I do have an interest in hockey but my account is about autism so I don’t want a bunch of hockey talk in my time line.

Introducing lists!

In Twitter, you can create a list, call it hockey and put people that discuss hockey into it. Any time a hockey person follows you because they have an interest in your tweets…. instead of hitting the follow button, list them.

This way, your main time line is still entirely focused on your topic of interest and any time you want to indulge in hockey talk, you just click on your list and presto, a new time line that consists of nothing but hockey.

You’re not following them… but you are. It might not be a +1 in their followers count but you are still “following” them in a sense.

People will always abuse a good thing

It’s a good notion, to not be rude… to follow people that follow you just to be nice. But let’s be honest… there are thousands, if not, millions of people who take advantage of that concept.

Every single day, I get people who follow just so that I’ll follow them back and give them that +1.

They’re usually pretty easy to spot. Often they’ll be following 4000 people and have 1000 followers back. Some of them have 0 tweets yet they follow 800 people and have 200 people following them.

Why are those 200 people following that person?? Oh right, unwritten rule. It’s certainly not to read the 0 tweets they have.

There are people that will stack up hundreds of thousands of follows, knowing they’ll get tens of thousands of people following them back before they even make their first tweet.

They’re counting on it. And why? Status I guess. Just to have that big number. It certainly doesn’t make them any money. Or does it?

If you followed them, there’s a very good chance that your time line will light up with some spam at some point in the future. Seemed harmless before but with tens of thousands of followers, they have a big audience to spam to now.

Conclusion

Put aside the need to have a big follower count. It’s really not as much of a status symbol as you might think. If you’re on Twitter just for the sake of screwing around, then fine. Do what ever you want. No harm, no loss.

But if you’re even remotely serious about using Twitter to learn, to educate, to make money or anything like that… it’s probably best that you think of the unwritten rule as more of a guideline.

If it was real life, you’d follow the people that interest you. Plain and simple. Why should Twitter be different?